Gradle is called the next generation of build automation and dependency management. If you have used Ant or Maven you know what that mean.
Gradle is based on Groovy and has compatibility with existing tools like Ant and Maven.
The company behind this project is Gradleware.
Build Automation
As you know, manual tasks are error-prone and tedious. Take in mind that you are working in a project and you have to compile your code… manually!!! It’s boring and you are spending time if you are doing this, Can you imaging running javac command for all your project and dependencies? and after that you need to package the artifact in a jar or war. Ant is the first tool which help developers to write a xml file with all the step to compile, copy, package artifacts. Currently, Maven have standardized all of this and it is charge of to run all the previous tasks and manage the dependencies.
Dependency Management
All the projects have dependencies with other projects, years ago and even now is a headache when you are copying and pasting jars inside your projects. To avoid this pain maven and ivy are tools to manage this.
Getting Started
It is really cool to see what amazing things you can do with Gradle. It allow us to work with java, groovy and scala projects too.
I really like the easy way to add tasks and manage the dependencies between them. Another good thing is the capability to extend the functionality in Java or Groovy.
Gradle have the power run tasks in a new way: Gradle task name abbreviation. For example, if you have created a task called deployInLocalhost… run gradle dIL instead ofgradle deployInLocalhost but make sure you have not another task with the same abbreviation.
Gradle Wrapper
I remember when I started using maven, I had downloaded some examples but that was not enough. I had to install maven in my local machine. To avoid install new runtime manually like I did, Gradle Wrapper has arrived to the rescue!!!
As a best practice, it is a good idea to have a wrapper in your project in order to avoid compatibility troubles or any other issues. To apply the wrapper configuration you just need to execute this command gradle wrapper and changes to your project will be applied, your wrapper will have the same version as your gradle runtime but you can change it.
Gradle Daemon
Gradle take time to up and run when task is executed. If you want to improve the performance, Gradle daemons is here to the rescue… to active it gradle –daemon and finalize the process gradle –stop. This is useful when you run unit test many times.
Note: expire after 3 hours.
Moving from Maven to Gradle
Currently, you may are working with maven so if you want to try gradle without lost all your maven configuration you can run this command gradle maven2gradle. It will create the build.gradle and settings.gradle files with all the dependencies and configuration. Looks great, right? but as a new build automation tool, gradle is growing so if you have additional plugin configuration in your pom.xml this will not be migrated. Your project can live with both.
Gradle Commands
I will describe some useful commands but to get more information visit online documentation.
All those commands start with gradle: gradle <command>
Commands:
-v or –version -> display gradle version.
tasks -> display tasks related to the project.
-q -> show tasks output.
-x or gradle –exclude-task -> exclude the execution of tasks defined.
dependencies -> display project dependencies and how dependencies were solved.
projects -> list all the project and subprojects.
properties -> list all available properties in the project.
-a or –no-rebuild -> it’s used when you won’t to rebuild a projects that you didn’t change. It works if you are only changing files in a single project.
–refresh-dependencies -> refresh project dependencies.
-b or –build-file -> give the option to choose another build script.
-Dtest.debug test -> debug test in port 5005