Chapter 7. Java Quickstart

The Java plugin adds quite a few tasks to your project. However, there are only a handful of tasks that you will need to use to build the project. The most commonly used task is the build task, which does a full build of the project. When you run gradle build, Gradle will compile and test your code, and create a JAR file containing your main classes and resources:

> gradle build
:compileJava
:processResources
:classes
:jar
:assemble
:compileTestJava
:processTestResources
:testClasses
:test
:check
:build

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 1 secs

Some other useful tasks are:

Usually, a Java project will have some dependencies on external JAR files. To reference these JAR files in the project, you need to tell Gradle where to find them. In Gradle, artifacts such as JAR files, are located in a repository. A repository can be used for fetching the dependencies of a project, or for publishing the artifacts of a project, or both. For this example, we will use the public Maven repository:

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

Let's add some dependencies. Here, we will declare that our production classes have a compile-time dependency on commons collections, and that our test classes have a compile-time dependency on junit:

dependencies {
    compile group: 'commons-collections', name: 'commons-collections', version: '3.2'
    testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.+'
}

You can find out more in Chapter 8, Dependency Management Basics.

The Java plugin adds a number of properties to your project. These properties have default values which are usually sufficient to get started. It's easy to change these values if they don't suit. Let's look at this for our sample. Here we will specify the version number for our Java project, along with the Java version our source is written in. We also add some attributes to the JAR manifest.

sourceCompatibility = 1.5
version = '1.0'
jar {
    manifest {
        attributes 'Implementation-Title': 'Gradle Quickstart',
                   'Implementation-Version': version
    }
}

The tasks which the Java plugin adds are regular tasks, exactly the same as if they were declared in the build file. This means you can use any of the mechanisms shown in earlier chapters to customize these tasks. For example, you can set the properties of a task, add behaviour to a task, change the dependencies of a task, or replace a task entirely. In our sample, we will configure the test task, which is of type Test, to add a system property when the tests are executed:

test {
    systemProperties 'property': 'value'
}

Usually the JAR file needs to be published somewhere. To do this, you need to tell Gradle where to publish the JAR file. In Gradle, artifacts such as JAR files are published to repositories. In our sample, we will publish to a local directory. You can also publish to a remote location, or multiple locations.

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
       flatDir {
           dirs 'repos'
       }
    }
}

To publish the JAR file, run gradle uploadArchives.

To create the Eclipse-specific descriptor files, like .project, you need to add another plugin to your build file:

apply plugin: 'eclipse'

Now execute gradle eclipse command to generate Eclipse project files. More information about the eclipse task can be found in Chapter 38, The Eclipse Plugin.

Here's the complete build file for our sample:

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'eclipse'

sourceCompatibility = 1.5
version = '1.0'
jar {
    manifest {
        attributes 'Implementation-Title': 'Gradle Quickstart',
                   'Implementation-Version': version
    }
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    compile group: 'commons-collections', name: 'commons-collections', version: '3.2'
    testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.+'
}

test {
    systemProperties 'property': 'value'
}

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
       flatDir {
           dirs 'repos'
       }
    }
}

To define a multi-project build, you need to create a settings file. The settings file lives in the root directory of the source tree, and specifies which projects to include in the build. It must be called settings.gradle. For this example, we are using a simple hierarchical layout. Here is the corresponding settings file:

include "shared", "api", "services:webservice", "services:shared"

You can find out more about the settings file in Chapter 57, Multi-project Builds.

For most multi-project builds, there is some configuration which is common to all projects. In our sample, we will define this common configuration in the root project, using a technique called configuration injection. Here, the root project is like a container and the subprojects method iterates over the elements of this container - the projects in this instance - and injects the specified configuration. This way we can easily define the manifest content for all archives, and some common dependencies:

subprojects {
    apply plugin: 'java'
    apply plugin: 'eclipse-wtp'

    repositories {
       mavenCentral()
    }

    dependencies {
        testCompile 'junit:junit:4.11'
    }

    version = '1.0'

    jar {
        manifest.attributes provider: 'gradle'
    }
}

Notice that our sample applies the Java plugin to each subproject. This means the tasks and configuration properties we have seen in the previous section are available in each subproject. So, you can compile, test, and JAR all the projects by running gradle build from the root project directory.

Also note that these plugins are only applied within the subprojects section, not at the root level, so the root build will not expect to find Java source files in the root project, only in the subprojects.

You can add dependencies between projects in the same build, so that, for example, the JAR file of one project is used to compile another project. In the api build file we will add a dependency on the shared project. Due to this dependency, Gradle will ensure that project shared always gets built before project api.

dependencies {
    compile project(':shared')
}

We also add a distribution, that gets shipped to the client:

task dist(type: Zip) {
    dependsOn spiJar
    from 'src/dist'
    into('libs') {
        from spiJar.archivePath
        from configurations.runtime
    }
}

artifacts {
   archives dist
}