Hans Dockter

Presentations

Introduction to Gradle

Gradle combines the flexibility of Ant with a build-by-convention approach a la Maven. But both implemented in a more powerful and less restrictive way. You will learn about Gradle's rich domain model which provides a true build language. Thus offering the abstractions missing with Ant without the restrictions and obstacles of a rigid framework. Gradle has a particular focus on enterprise builds. One aspect of this is are many optimization strategies for building fast and yet reliable.

This talk will be mostly driven by examples. We introduce Gradle with a simple hello world build and then work with a plain Java and a Java Web project. From there we go to a more complex multi-project build. During those live sessions we will discuss major Gradle features, like: - Dependency Management - A Rich API that allows you to interact with the tasks and to orchestrate them. - A Deep API that allows you to hook into and define custom rules for all aspects of the build. - Deep integration of existing Ant build scripts. - Smart execution model (e.g. smart skipping and full access to the execution plan). - Powerful support for multiproject builds.

Gradle in the Enterprise

The requirements for Enterprise builds are often particularly challenging. The Gradle build system has a particular focus on those requirements. Although Gradle comes with out-of-the-box support for standard Java/Groovy/Web projects, it never forces you into adopting to a certain behavior. First Gradle gives you a lot of freedom to customize the standard behavior. But you may also not use the standard behavior at all. You can either have a complete custom build, or define your own behavior rules which you can then applie to all your enterprise builds. Another important enterprise feature of Gradle is its smart optimization of executing the build. Gradle only does what is necessary without compromising on reliability. Additional enterprise features are the flexible multi-project-build support and the highly customizable dependency management.

We will give you many examples how to use Gradle's deep API to define very fine-grained custom configuration rules for all aspects of the build. You will see the many varieties to integrate custom code into Gradle builds. We will show many of Gradle's power features regarding dependency management and multi-project build support. You will also learn how easy it is to write custom plugins and how to use Gradle's toolkit for optimizing the execution of your custom tasks in regard to changing input values.