Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementations Guide - Second Edition

By : Hubert Klein Ikkink
Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementations Guide - Second Edition

By: Hubert Klein Ikkink

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Gradle Effective Implementations Guide - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Packaging Java Enterprise Edition applications


We have discussed 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 the War type 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 webInf() method 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 to the WAR file. This is just another way to include a web...