About this Book
This book is divided into three parts. The first part gives an introduction to Gradle’s concepts and philosophy, explaining how it compares to other build tools and how to write scripts to automate simple tasks. Part two explores the tool’s building blocks and core techniques in greater depth. You should be able to use this knowledge to implement complex, extendable, enterprise builds. The third part describes how Gradle can be used in the context of continuous deliver, focusing on topics like polyglot builds, code quality, artifact assembly, and deployment.
The chapters in part 1, Introducing Gradle, are as follows:
1. Introduction to project automation—This chapter gives a gentle introduction into why it’s a good idea to automate your projects and how build tools can help get the job done.
2. Next generation builds with Gradle—How does Gradle compare to existing JVM-language build tools? This chapter covers Gradle’s extensive feature set and how it helps automate your software delivery process in the context of a Continuous Delivery deployment pipeline. As a first taste, you’ll write a simple build script and run it on the command line.
3. Building a Gradle project by example—This chapter introduces a Java-based web application as a vehicle to demonstrate some of Gradle’s core features. We’ll explore the use of the Java plugin for standardized and nonconventional use cases and examine productivity tools for fast development turnaround.