Gradle Fundamentals
by Kevin Jones
Gradle is the latest and greatest Java build tool, providing the power of Maven but with a far more readable, maintainable, and powerful development model.
What you'll learn
This course is an introduction to Gradle. Gradle is a Java tool that manages your build environment; it is the new-ish kid on the block of Java build tools and is the tool that Android Studio uses to build Android applications. Gradle lets you compile and test your code, create jars and wars for your applications, generate Javadoc, and much, much more. It is highly and easily extendable. While Gradle itself is written in Java, it provides a DSL that’s written in Groovy in which you write the configuration scripts. This course covers the basics of Gradle, from writing tasks in the DSL, through running Java builds and unit testing, on to ways to extend the build language itself. Gradle does not provide its own dependency management system but instead can use Maven’s or Ivy’s; we see how to configure and use both of those systems. Finally the class looks at the Gradle 'wrapper', a mechanism to ensure your developers always use the correct version of Gradle.
About the author
A long time ago in a university far, far away Kevin fell in love with programming. Initially on the university's DEC20 computer doing BASIC and Pascal and a little bit of Fortran. His first job had him writing batch PL/1 on an IBM mainframe where he also discovered the arcane delights of JCL. He soon realized the multiuser systems were not for him after discovering the delights of dBase IV on IBM PCs. From here it was all downhill as he became addicted to C and the Windows API. Just missing out ... moreon coding for Windows 1, he did code for the other 16 bit versions of Windows, 2 and 3, including the various network-ready versions. He still remembers the awkwardness of having to carry an IBM Token Ring MAU with him wherever he went.
After trying to pretend that Windows and C were really object oriented he decided that it would be better to learn C++. It was around this point that he realized that as well as writing code for a living he could be paid for telling people how to write code for a living. He taught Windows, MFC and C++ for a UK training company before his spirit was broken on the back of the OLE support in MFC when he finally stepped away from the nightmare of unmanaged code to the nirvana of the managed runtime called Java.
It was at this time that he spoke at several JavaOne conferences usually on the subject of Servlets, JavaServer Pages and tag libraries. After buying the Sun employees copious amounts of Apple Martini Kevin was invited onto the expert groups for the Servlet and JSP specifications.
Oh, how he laughed when .Net appeared and the same arguments raged about non-deterministic destruction and garbage collection that were now so old hat in the Java world. He finally got his hands dirty in C# and .Net about eight years ago, again working in the web tier and hating every minute of the using the monstrosity that was and is ASP.Net Web Forms. It wasn't until MVC appeared that he finally felt he had come home to Microsoft.
Now of course MVC is so last year and Kevin is focusing more and more on rich clients using JavaScript and tools such as Knockout and AngularJS. He believes that JavaScript is the best thing since, well, JavaScript.
He still retains his passion for developing and teaching; spending about a quarter of the year doing the latter and most of the time doing the former.
When not stuck in front of a computer you can find him: with his nose in a book, a good one preferably, but almost any book would do; watching a film; walking; running; or annoying his wife by watching sports on television.
