Gradle is an advanced general purpose build management system written in Groovy. Gradle has a highly-customizable dependency resolution engine, visual build inspection and debugging tools, and many work avoidance mechanisms. Using Gradle, we can develop apps to microservices for small startups to big enterprises faster. The Enterprise edition of Gradle provides remote caching and test artifacts across the team to speed up the build.
Why do you require Gradle?
Gradle facilitates you to build any software by making assumptions about what you’re trying to build or how it should be done. Gradle avoids additional work by only running essential tasks. Gradle provides caching to enable the reuse of task outputs.
Features
- Declarative builds and build-by-convention
- Language for dependency based programming
- Gradle has a perfect structure for build and you can design well-structured, easily maintained, comprehensible build using it.
- Deep API using which you can monitor and customize its configuration and execution behavior to its core.
- Gradle helps to develop single project builds to huge enterprise multi-project builds.
- Gradle supports ANT tasks, Maven and lvy repository infrastructure. We can easily convert Maven pom.xml to Gradle script.
- Ease of migration
- Gradle Wrapper helps to execute Gradle builds on systems where Gradle is not installed.
- Gradle is an open source project and licensed under the Apache Software License (ASL).
- Gradle allows you to write your own script with some abstractions.
The completed build.gradle file for a task to print the string “Hello World” will look like this:
----------------------------------------------------------------- apply plugin: 'java' apply plugin: 'eclipse' apply plugin: 'application' mainClassName = 'hello.HelloWorld' // tag::repositories[] repositories { mavenCentral() } // end::repositories[] // tag::jar[] jar { baseName = 'gs-gradle' version = '0.1.0' } // end::jar[] // tag::dependencies[] sourceCompatibility = 1.8 targetCompatibility = 1.8 dependencies { compile "joda-time:joda-time:2.2" testCompile "junit:junit:4.12" } // end::dependencies[] // tag::wrapper[] // end::wrapper[] --------------------------------------------------------------------
Consumers of Gradle
Gradle is listed in the top 20 open-source projects and is trusted by millions of developers. Gradle helps developers to build, improve build reliability and accelerates debugging.
Comparison with other tools
– The biggest differences in performance with Maven are Gradle’s mechanisms for work avoidance and incrementality.
– Maven can override a dependency, but only by version.
– Gradle provides customizable rules for dependency.
– Gradle provides a much better IDE experience using a Kotlin-based DSL.
– Gradle provides a built-in capability to resolve dependencies.