Hans Dpckter's 2-day Gradle, a Build System for Java Workshop will enable you to become familiar with all the major concepts of Gradle and how to best use Gradle for both simple and complex build scenarios. This Gradle workshop is packed with hands-on exercises. You will learn about the basic language elements of the Gradle Domain Specific Language (DSL), and how to use Gradle’s build-by-convention for plain Java and Java web projects, and the Gradle plugin system. You will see how easy it is to customize your build. You will learn about Gradle’s mighty dependency management. And much more … This 2-day Gradle course has been developed by Gradle’s founder and Project lead Hans Dockter.

Overview of the Java build system landscape

• Ant vs Maven
• Apache Ivy vs. Maven’s dependency management
• Shortcomings of Ant and Maven
• Gradle to the rescue
• Migration paths to Gradle
• The importance of project automation

The Core of Gradle – A general purpose build system

• The inevitable ‘hello world’
• Build scripts are code
• Dependencies between tasks
• Dynamic tasks and the Gradle rule engine
• The tasks API
• Using Ant from Gradle
• Background: Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) – The heart of (almost) every build system.
• Configuration by DAG
• Under the hood: How the build scripts interact with Gradle
• Gradle logging
• How Gradle can give you information about your build.

Convention over Configuration

Gradle’s plugin architecture
The Java Plugin
Other plugins

The many ways to customize your build

• Custom Plugins
• Custom Tasks
• How to hook into the Gradle build lifecycle.

Managing your dependencies and artifacts

• Declaring dependencies in your build script
• Integrating with your existing repository infrastructure.
• Client Modules: Transitive dependency management without XML and remote repositories.
• Strategies for dependency management.
• Uploading your project’s artifacts
• Release Management

Multi-project builds

• The problem with existing multi-project build solutions.
• A multi-project ‘hello world’
• Cross-Project configuration
• Execution and Configuration Dependencies
• Partial Builds: Classpath Dependencies between Java projects

Organizing your build logic

• Scaling from simple to complex
• How to integrate your own classes into your build scripts
• Dependency management for your build scripts

Miscellaneous

• The Gradle Wrapper: How to run Gradle builds on machines where Gradle is not installed (e.g. continuous integration servers)
• IDE support
• Gradle’s future roadmap