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

Why plugins?


In Gradle, we can apply plugins to our project. A plugin basically adds extra functionalities such as tasks and properties to our project. By using a plugin, functionality is decoupled from the core Gradle build logic. We can write our own plugins, but Gradle also ships with plugins that are ready out of the box. For example, Gradle has a Java plugin. This plugin adds tasks for compiling, testing, and packaging Java source code to our project.

The plugins that are packaged with a Gradle version are never updated or changed for this version, so if a new functionality is added to a plugin, a whole new Gradle version will be released. In the future versions of Gradle, this will change. This doesn't apply for the plugins that we write ourselves. We can release new versions of our own plugins, independent of the Gradle version. Let's start with the Java plugin that is a part of the Gradle distribution.