Let's install Gradle before we start from http://gradle.org/installation.

Create a new directory where we will place the new project:

mkdir vaadin-in-gradle

Carry out the following steps in order to create a new project in Gradle:

Gradle is following the convention over configuration paradigm and that is why Gradle build scripts are so minimalistic. For example, the default source folder for Groovy files is src/main/groovy and we can change it by the following code that we place inside the build script build.gradle.

sourceSets {
  main {
    groovy {
      srcDirs = ['src/groovy']
    }
  }
}

The next valuable thing about Gradle is good documentation:

http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/userguide_single.html

Let's have a bit more detailed look at what the Gradle plugin for Vaadin did for us.

When we run the createVaadinProject target, the plugin creates two files. MyApplication.groovy inside com.example.myapplication package and web.xml in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF folder.

The plugin also defines the vaadinRun target that starts up the Jetty web server and deploys the application.

There are other targets such as createVaadinTheme, devmode, widgetset, and more in the Vaadin plugin. All these, and more information about the plugin configuration, can be found on the GitHub page:

https://github.com/johndevs/gradle-vaadin-plugin