Gradle for Java Developers

- [Instructor] I'm Jim Harmon. Welcome to this course on Gradle for Java developers. Gradle is quickly becoming one of the most popular tools for building Java applications, and this course will provide a concise overview of the primary features and capabilities of Gradle. We'll start with a discussion of the reasons why Gradle was developed along with a technical summary of how Gradle works. We'll start out by building a small Java project and then adding Gradle to it, which will reduce some of the pain points that there are in building an application. One of these pain points is managing dependencies, and we'll explore various ways that Gradle can help us there.

Then we'll see how we can break our project down into smaller pieces using Gradle modules. We'll take a quick tour of the Gradle project directory structure so you can become familiar with what the Gradle project looks like and how it differs from a regular Java project. Then, we will discuss one of the key elements of Gradle, Gradle Tasks. You'll learn about how to build tasks, how to create them yourselves, and even extend tasks. Large project builds can often take a long time to run, so we'll also explore various ways of profiling Gradle builds and identifying opportunities for performance improvements.

My hope is that this introduction to Gradle will convince you of its value and provide you with enough knowledge to start using Gradle on your own projects.