Uberconf 10

Gradle
A Better Way To Build
Monday, October 25, 2010

SpringOne 2GX 2009. All rights reserved. Do not distribute without permission.
3
About Hans Dockter
• Founder, Gradle
• CEO, Gradle Inc.
• Before Gradle:
o Trainer, Mentor, Consultant
for Enterprise Java.
o Senior Developer for Krugle and
Volkswagen.
• Prehistoric ;): Committer to JBoss and founder of
JBoss-IDE.

• A general purpose build system
• It comes with a Groovy DSL and a Java core.
• Provides build-in support for Java, Groovy, Scala,
Web, OSGi projects.
• Gradle provides exciting solutions for many of the
big pain points you often have with current builds.
– Maintainability
– Performance
– Usability
4
What is Gradle?

What is Gradle?
Gradle is declarative
You specify the WHAT
Gradle figures out the HOW

SpringOne 2GX 2009. All rights reserved. Do not distribute without permission.SpringOne 2GX 2009. All rights reserved. Do not distribute without permission.
Extensible
Build Language
instead of a
Build Framework

• Deep Configuration API
• Deep Execution API
• Rich API
• Extendable Domain Objects
• Custom Tasks
• Custom Plugins
7
Extending Gradle

Custom Declarative Elements
usePlugin ʻeditionsʼ
productEditions {
enterprise core, plugins, powerAddons
public core, plugins, openApi
}
> gradle enterpriseEditionZip
> gradle publicEditionTar

Gradle
is
declarative
without
being rigid

The Build Language
Source Sets
Dependencies
Configurations
Archives
Projects
Artifacts
Custom Tasks
Plugins

XML and the What
It does not matter much
whether a build system
uses XML or Groovy for
declaring things.

Please
no
messy
build scripts

• Separate Imperative from Declarative
• Custom Tasks/Plugins
• BuildSrc
• Jar
13
Organizing Build Logic

14
buildscript {
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
classpath 'commons-math:commons-math:1.1'
}
}
task math << {
org.apache.commons.math.fraction.Fraction lhs = new
org.apache.commons.math.fraction.Fraction(1, 3);
// do something
}
Build Script Libraries

Performance
is one of the
biggest
pain points
of complex builds.

Should clean be
required for a
reliable build?
(Hint: We have the
21st century)

• Incremental Build
• Parallel Testing
• Soon: Parallel Builds
• Not too distant future: Distributed testing/builds
• Rich Model
17
Speed Improvements

Gradle is
a
Build
Integration
Tool

• Ant Tasks
• Deep import of Ant builds
• Retrieve/Deploy to Maven/Ivy repositories
• Autogeneration of pom.xml/ivy.xml
• Future: Deep import of Maven builds
19
Build Integration Features

• Mission Critical!
• Very expensive if the build system can’t adapt to the
existing project layout:
– Freeze
– Project automation not working for a while
– Different branches (unreliable, hard to compare, ...)
• Gradle’s suppleness enables baby steps.
– Gradle can adapt to any project layout.
– No separate branches
– Comparable --> You can write tests
20
Build Migration

Dependency Management
• Transitive Dependencies
• Repository less dependencies are 1st class citizens.
• Excludes per configuration or dependency
• Very flexible repository handling
• Based on Apache Ivy
• Powerful API
• Much More ...

Deep Integration with
Ant Builds
> gradle hello
Hello, from Gradle...Here comes Ant...
[ant:echo] Hello, from Ant
<project>
<target name="hello" depends="intro">
<echo>Hello, from Ant</echo>
</target>
</project>
ant.importBuild 'build.xml'
hello.doFirst { println 'Here comes Ant' }
task intro << { println 'Hello, from Gradle'}

• Supports Maven/Ant/Gradle with pom or ivy.
• Supports any repository layout
• Very advanced features
• Gradle Artifactory plugin
• Integrated in Gradle Hudson plugin.
• Gradle Inc. has business partnership with JFrog.
23
Build Eco System

Process is very
important.
But it is all about
YOUR
process

Their is
no one-size-fits-all
project structure
for the
enterprise.

The physical
structure of your
projects should be
determined by
your
requirements.
(What, if not?)

Be as
rigid
as
YOU
want

FRAME-
WORKITIS

34
Fighting with a Framework

Gradle Wrapper
>./gradlew assemble

• Very active community (mailing-list, patches, issues)
• Apache v2 license.
• Excellent user’s guide (200+ pages) + many samples
• Frequent releases, multiple commits per day
• Quality is king:
– 2800 unit tests, Many hundreds of integration test
– Healthy codebase
– low defect rate
• Commiter -> Steve Appling, Hans Dockter, Tom
Eyckmans, Adam Murdoch, Russel Winder
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Project Background

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Commercial Support: www.gradle.biz

Q&A

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