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

Groovy for Gradle build scripts


To be proficient with Gradle and write effective build scripts, we need to understand some basics of Groovy, which is a fantastic dynamic language in itself. If we have any experience with dynamic languages such as Ruby or Python, in addition to Java, we will feel right at home with Groovy. If not, still knowing that most of the Java syntax is also the valid Groovy syntax should make us feel happy about Groovy, because we can start writing Groovy code and be productive from day one without having to learn anything.

To an unprepared eye, Gradle scripts may look a little difficult to comprehend at first. Gradle build scripts do not merely use the Groovy syntax, but also use a rich and expressive DSL that provides high-level abstractions to represent common build-related logics. Let's take a quick look at what makes Groovy a great choice for writing build files.

Note

Using Groovy for writing build logics is not new. Gant and GMaven have already used Groovy to write...