A comprehensive guide to get up and running with build automation using Gradle
About This Book
- Practical and engaging from start to finish covering the fundamentals of Gradle
- Learn the skills required to develop Java applications with Gradle and integrate at an enterprise level
- Apply the correct plugin and configuration to our Gradle build files to work with the different languages
Who This Book Is For
This book is for Java developers who have working knowledge of build automation processes and are now looking to gain expertise with Gradle and add to their skill set.
What You Will Learn
- Write your first Gradle Script
- Write build logic with the Gradle build language
- Explore the Java plugins supported by Gradle
- Understand dependency management in Gradle
- Package and publish your (web) application
- Integrate Scala and Groovy with Gradle
- Write your own custom tasks and plugins
- Integrate Gradle with your IDE
In Detail
Gradle is a project automation tool that has a wide range of applications. The basic aim of Gradle is to automate a wide variety of tasks performed by software developers, including compiling computer source code to binary code, packaging binary codes, running tests, deploying applications to production systems, and creating documentation.
The book will start with the fundamentals of Gradle and introduce you to the tools that will be used in further chapters. You will learn to create and work with Gradle scripts and then see how to use Gradle to build your Java Projects. While building Java application, you will find out about other important topics such as dependency management, publishing artifacts, and integrating the application with other JVM languages such as Scala and Groovy.
By the end of this book, you will be able to use Gradle in your daily development. Writing tasks, applying plugins, and creating build logic will be your second nature.
Style and approach
This step-by-step guide aims to cover the fundamentals of Gradle and focuses on providing the practical skills required to develop web application.
Hubert Klein Ikkink was born in 1973 and currently lives in Tilburg, Netherlands, with his beautiful wife and gorgeous children. He is also known as mrhaki, which is simply the first letters of his name prepended with mr. He studied information systems and management at Tilburg University. After finishing his studies, he started working at a company specialized in knowledge-based software. There he started writing his first Java software (yes, an applet!) in 1996. During these years, his focus switched from applets to servlets to Java Enterprise Edition applications to Spring-based software. In 2008, he wanted to have fun when writing software. The larger projects he was working on were more about writing configuration XML files and tuning performance and less about real development in his eyes, so he started to look around and noticed that Groovy was a very good language to learn. He could still use the existing Java code and libraries and use his Groovy classes in Java. The learning curve isn't steep and to support his learning phase, he wrote interesting Groovy facts on his blog with the title Groovy Goodness. He posts small articles with a lot of code samples to understand how to use Groovy. Since November 2011, he is also a DZone Most Valuable Blogger (MVB), where DZone post his blog items on their site. During these years, he also wrote about other subjects such as Grails, Gradle, Spock, Asciidoctor, and Ratpack. Hubert was invited to speak at conferences such as Gr8Conf in Copenhagen, Minneapolis, and Greach, Madrid. Also, he gave presentations at Java conferences such as JFall in Netherlands and Javaland in Germany. Hubert works for a company called JDriven in Netherlands. JDriven focuses on technologies that simplify and improve development of enterprise applications. Employees of JDriven have years of experience with Java and related technologies and are all eager to learn about new technologies. Hubert works on projects using Grails and Java combined with Groovy and Gradle.
