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Gradle 7 Build Tool Fundamentals

by Kevin Jones

Gradle is the newish kid on the block of Java build tools and is the tool that Android Studio uses. Gradle lets you compile and test your code, create jars and wars for your applications, generate Javadoc, and much more.

What you'll learn

Gradle is a Java tool that manages your build environment. It lets you build test and run your code. Through plugins it is easily extendable. While Gradle itself is written in Java it provides two DSLs: one that is written in Groovy and one that is written in Kotlin, in which you write the configuration scripts. This course, Gradle 7 Build Tool Fundamentals, covers the essentials of Gradle. First, you will learn about writing basic build scripts in the DSL. Next, you will discover how to runn Java and Kotlin builds. Then, you will explore unit testing with JUnit 4 and JUnit 5. Gradle does not provide its own dependency management system but instead can use Maven’s or Ivy’s. You will see how to configure and use both of these systems. The course also shows how to test with both JUnit 4 and how to configure your Gradle scripts to test with JUnit 5. Finally, the class looks at the Gradle ‘wrapper’ - a mechanism to ensure your developers always use the correct version of Gradle. By the end of this course, you will know how to use Gradle to manage project with one or more builds. All examples throughout the class use both the Kotlin and Groovy DSLs and all the demo code has the examples in both languages.

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 ... more

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