Book Image

Gradle Essentials

By : Abhinandan Maheshwari
Book Image

Gradle Essentials

By: Abhinandan Maheshwari

Overview of this book

Gradle is an advanced and modern build automation tool. It inherits the best elements of the past generation of build tools, but it also differs and innovates to bring terseness, elegance, simplicity, and the flexibility to build. Right from installing Gradle and writing your first build file to creating a fully-fledged multi-module project build, this book will guide you through its topics in a step-by-step fashion. You will get your hands dirty with a simple Java project built with Gradle and go on to build web applications that are run with Jetty or Tomcat. We take a unique approach towards explaining the DSL using the Gradle API, which makes the DSL more accessible and intuitive. All in all, this book is a concise guide to help you decipher the Gradle build files, covering the essential topics that are most useful in real-world projects. With every chapter, you will learn a new topic and be able to readily implement your build files.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Gradle Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Building a simple Java project


To demonstrate the Java project's build with Gradle, let's create a very simple Java application that will greet a user. Just a tad bit more than a hello world in terms of application logic.

Firstly, create a directory called hello-java. This is our project directory. For the following steps, feel free to choose an IDE/text editor of your choice for editing the files.

Creating a build file

In the root of the project directory, let's create the build.gradle file and add the following code line to it:

apply plugin: 'java'

Yes, that's all that goes into the build file for now, a single line. We will soon see what it means.

Adding source files

By default, like Maven, the Java source files are read from the src/main/java directory of the project. We can configure this, of course, but let's save that for later. Let's create this directory structure in our project.

Now, we need to create a Java class that would generate the greeting message. Also, we would create a Main class...