For our production code we apply a wealth of design values and principles. Currently this is rarely done for our builds. Yet the project automation domain, specially in the enterprise, is often at least as complex as the business domain. The design of a build is also heavily influenced and possibly constrained by the design of the build system you are using.

The build systems under review (Ant. Maven, Gradle) are dramatically different and thus the design of the corresponding builds. We will talk about best practices for build design and how different build systems might support that or stand in the way, thus preventing expressive, maintainable and easy to use builds. Those differences should be a major factor when you are choosing a build system appropriate to your needs.

The presentation is available at:

https://prezi.com/secure/6fb2b21de9c6c1b9247a5f4007849e3d4e8814d3/

Gradle allows you to describe your build using a rich, easily extendable build language based on Groovy. It provides compelling solutions for many of the big pain points that exist with current build systems. This session will be mostly driven by live demos. You will see how easy and elegant Gradle enables you to solve a broad range of requirements - over the full life cycle of typical and atypical Java builds and will include many of the new and upcoming 1.0 features.

The demos span Gradle’s revised dependency management, environment specific multi-project builds, the new Maven import feature, IDE integration, test result analysis, code sharing, parallel testing, incremental builds, …