Presentations

Beauty and the Beast: Software-Design for Builds and Build Systems

For our production code we apply a wealth of design values and principles. Currently this is rarely done for our builds. Yet the project automation domain, specially in the enterprise, is often at least as complex as the business domain.

The design of your build is heavily influenced and possibly constrained by the design of the build system you are using. The main focus of this talk is to evaluate those design forces of the build systems. Mostly with the help of two books: Refactoring by Martin Fowler and Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans.

The build systems under review are dramatically different and thus the design of the corresponding builds. We will talk about best practices for build design and how different build systems might support that or stand in the way, thus preventing expressive, maintainable and easy to use builds. Those differences should be a major factor when you are choosing a build system appropriate to your needs.

The speaker is the founder of Gradle. So there might be some bias :). But the design principles referred to are core principles fully accepted by the Java community. The way they are violated is astonishingly obvious once pointed out. Production code would not get away with this and neither should builds.

Enterprise Gradle

In this talk we will cover many Gradle power features that are particularly helpful for the real heavy lifting often needed in enterprise builds.

We will start this session with the concept and advantages of autowiring the Task Dependency Graph based on the inputs and outputs. We will then talk in detail about the new dependency management features such as the new cache, customizable dynamic revision handling and customizable version conflict resolution. From there we'll explore the new extension mechanism for the Gradle DSL and introduce the Gradle daemon. We will also discuss our take on best practices for dealing with module dependencies in the enterprise and how this can be mapped with Gradle. Finally we will show how you can programatically customize the way the Gradle build model is mapped to the STS Gradle Eclipse plugin. All those features are presented in the context of our roadmap and what further improvement you can expect with future releases.