Every Gradle build has access to a default set of tasks that can deliver insight information on your build settings. You probably have come across the dependencies task. This task can display dependencies associated with all configurations of a particular project; you can even instruct which configuration to be queried if the list of configurations happens to be very long. Let’s say we have a Java project that looks like this build.gradle plugins { id ‘java’ id ‘org.kordamp.gradle.project’ version ‘0.11.0’ } ext.build_property = ‘build’ config { license { enabled = false } publishing { enabled = false } } repositories Read More

Java 9 was release in September 2017 and with it came a brand new modular platform known as JPMS, delivered by Project Jigsaw. Building projects that an leverage this new feature can be a bit daunting however the Gradle plugins in the following list can help you in keeping things under control. 1. JDeps – https://github.com/aalmiray/jdeps-gradle-plugin This plugin generates a report of your production code and compile/runtime dependencies using the jdeps tool available since Java 8. Jdeps can tell you if your codebase is vulnerable to API changes such as relying on internal APIs (like sun.misc.Unsafe) even if you don’t Read More

Following up with the Gradle POM, where a familiar structure found in Maven projects can be brought to Gradle projects, I’d like to discuss another Maven feature that many see as an advantage and that’s lacking in Gradle: the ability to enforce settings in a top-down fashion with hierarchical POM files. In Maven, a parent POM delivers configuration that will be used by a child POM as is. Children POMs have the option to override and extend these properties. A typical use case in parent POMs is to provide <pluginManagement> and <dependencyManagement> sections; they also configure default dependencies, properties, plugins, Read More

Gradle is an extensible and very flexible build tool capable of building projects that target many platforms, not just Java. In the Java space it’s often compared to Apache Maven; one of the often cited complains against Gradle is that it’s “too complicated” or rather “too flexible” when compared to Apache Maven. It appears a large percentage of Maven users do love having a fixed structure that restricts the amount of havoc a junior developer may bring to the project if he or she desires to play with the build file. However this fixed structure also restricts power users from Read More