Hans Dockter, the founder and project lead of Gradle, will start this session by comparing Gradle to Ant and Maven2. After this you get introduced to the cgeneral purpose features of Gradle. You will learn about the build-by-convention functionality on top of this and how it can be customised. Hans will also cover Gradle’s advanced multi-project build support and its dependency management.

About Gradle
Gradle is a new, flexible general purpose build system with a build-by-convention framework a la Maven on top. It uses Apache Ivy under the hood for its dependency management. Its build scripts are written in Groovy.

A project’s build can do far more for your project than just compiling your software. There is a lot of repetitive, time consuming and boring stuff which is still done manually in many projects. For example release management, deployment, generating documentation or many integration tasks. It is the job of the build to take this weight from the shoulders of the developer. Furthermore, if such tasks are not automated, there execution is less reliable and done less frequently. Automation is a key for getting continuous feedback on your development work and thus is essential for agile projects. Automation also forces you to reflect on and master your development workflows instead of having them undefined and fuzzy.

With the current Java build tools project specific automation tasks are often very hard to implement. Gradle makes this much easier, be it for simple or very complex builds.

Some other features of Gradle:

• Gradle fully supports your existing Maven or Ivy repository infrastructure.
• Support for transitive dependency management without the need for remote repositories and pom.xml or ivy.xml files.
• Ant tasks as first class citizens.
• A wrapper to run Gradle builds on machines where Gradle is not installed (e.g. continuous integration server)

Have a look at Gradle’s website to learn more!

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	Framework web dynamique Grails Fabrice Robini : 9th Sep 2008
	Langage dynamique Groovy pour la JV... Guillaume LaForge : 9th Sep 2008
	Gant Russel Winder : 21st Aug 2008
	Flex, Silverlight or JavaFX Simon Brown : 20th Aug 2008
	Modeling with Grails Stuart Clayman : 31st Jul 2008
	Grails Graeme Rocher : 31st Jul 2008
	A RIA Solution to Reinvigorate Peter Pilgrim : 29th Jul 2008
	Gradle - A new Build System Hans Dockter : 21st Jul 2008
	RIA with JavaFX Peter Pilgrim : 26th Jun 2008
	Terracott: Network Attached Me Ari Zilka : 24th Jun 2008
	Performance Tuning Kirk Pepperdine : 23rd Jun 2008
	Offline and Batch Processing David Syer : 30th May 2008
	Reliable messaging transaction Rob Purcell : 30th May 2008