Kevin Jones | Pluralsight | Video course | 2h 16m | Beginner to Intermediate
Gradle is growing in popularity and is quickly becoming the industry standard build tool for Java projects. The initial years of my career centered around working with Maven so I was fairly resistant to using Gradle when finally confronted with it. As a tester, you may only be concerned with adding dependencies (as far as my experience with Maven went), this course will take you through that, plus a little more.
Why I took this course
As covered above, Gradle is now becoming more and more popular among development teams. I managed to get through my few years utilising a Gradle build file already in the project. But when it came to creating my own test framework using Gradle I knew I had to know more.
Course Overview:
Introduction
The course starts out with a basic introduction to Gradle, describing how it differs in comparison to other popular build tools such as Maven. It goes into some detail regarding ‘Groovy’, the language Gradle uses to express itself. This is excellent for me as it broke down the basics of a Gradle file into its simplest form. Something that up until this point I had always been hesitant to modify.
Gradle Tasks
The next 3 chapters cover Gradle tasks. This was extremely practical information for me. Click here to see my post on creating a Gradle test task. Kevin follows on from the previous chapters by not over-complicating things.
Using Gradle in a Java project and Dependencies
Anyone already working on a Gradle project will most likely be clear about what Kevin covers in the next section. Having said that, it was still extremely useful and ties in nicely with the previous content
Testing
Covers the basics around running tests using Gradle. The detail covered here is fairly basic but its an excellent starter
Conclusion
I completed this course over 2-3 days and felt it was well paced. The lessons were simple enough to follow and I will definitely see myself using what I have learnt going forward. It gave me a very good understanding of the Gradle build file which I always felt a little intimidated by, having been so familiar with the Maven POM file.
I would definitely recommend this course to anyone who is tackling a Gradle project for the first time. Especially testers due to the requirement for us to manage potential test suites.
I think overall it just put me in a more confident position, which for just over 2 hours of my time cant be argued against.
I am by no means a Gradle expert, but like I just said, i’m now that bit more confident with it, which can go along way.
