Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementation Guide

Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementation Guide

Overview of this book

Gradle is the next generation in build automation. It uses convention-over-configuration to provide good defaults, but is also flexible enough to be usable in every situation you encounter in daily development. Build logic is described with a powerful DSL and empowers developers to create reusable and maintainable build logic."Gradle Effective Implementation Guide" is a great introduction and reference for using Gradle. The Gradle build language is explained with hands on code and practical applications. You learn how to apply Gradle in your Java, Scala or Groovy projects, integrate with your favorite IDE and how to integrate with well-known continuous integration servers.Start with the foundations and work your way through hands on examples to build your knowledge of Gradle to skyscraper heights. You will quickly learn the basics of Gradle, how to write tasks, work with files and how to use write build scripts using the Groovy DSL. Then as you develop you will be shown how to use Gradle for Java projects. Compile, package, test and deploy your applications with ease. When you've mastered the simple, move on to the sublime and integrate your code with continuous integration servers and IDEs. By the end of the "Gradle Effective Implementation Guide" you will be able to use Gradle in your daily development. Writing tasks, applying plugins and creating build logic will be second nature.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Gradle Effective Implementation Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Packaging Java Enterprise Edition applications


We have learned how to create ZIP, TAR, and JAR archives with Gradle in this chapter and the previous one. In a Java project we can also package our applications as Web application Archive (WAR) or Enterprise Archive (EAR) files. For a web application we would like to package our application as a WAR file, while a Java Enterprise Edition application can be packaged as an EAR file. Gradle also supports these types of archives with plugins and tasks.

Creating a WAR file

To create a WAR file we can add a new task of type War to our Java project. The properties and methods of the War task are the same as for the other archive tasks such as Jar. In fact, the War task extends the Jar task.

The War task has an extra method, webInf(), to define a source directory for the WEB-INF directory in a WAR file. The webXml property can be used to reference a web.xml file that needs to be copied into the WAR file. This is just another way to include a web.xml...