Gradle Succinctly

What is Gradle?

Gradle is an open-source build automation system that was conceived upon a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL). Gradle was designed for multi-project builds, which can grow to be quite large. It supports incremental builds by intelligently determining which parts of the project are up-to-date, so that any task dependent upon those parts will not be re-executed.

The initial release of Gradle was published in 2007, and the project is considered to have active development status. The current stable release (at the time of writing) was published in March of 2016.

Gradle is being heralded as more than a build tool, but also as a means for automating the compilation, test, and release process. Qualified by its developers as a quantum leap for building technology in the Java world, some of Gradle’s features are:

• Declarative builds and build-by-convention: Based on a rich, extensible Domain Specific Language (DSL) based on Groovy, Gradle provides declarative language elements that the user can assemble as desired. Those elements also provide build-by-convention support for Java, Groovy, OSGi, Web, and Scala projects. The declarative language is extensible, allowing you to add new language elements or enhance the existing ones.
• Language for dependency-based programming: The declarative language lies on top of a general purpose task graph. It provides utmost flexibility to adapt Gradle to specific or unique development needs.
• Custom-structured builds: Gradle allows you to apply common design principles to a build. For example, it’s very easy to compose a build from reusable pieces of build logic, creating a well-structured and easily maintained build.
• Multi project builds: Gradle allows users to model project relationships in a multi-project according to the user’s layout. Also, it provides partial builds, so that when a single subproject is built, Gradle takes care of building all subprojects that subproject depends on. The user can choose to rebuild the subprojects that depend on a specific subproject.
• Groovy: Build scripts are written in Groovy. This is intended to orientate Gradle to be used as a language, not as a framework.
• Free and open source: Gradle is an open-source project, licensed under the ASL (Apache Software License), which can be viewed here.