Gradle Plugin Best Practices by Example
Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2015
Presenter: Benjamin Muschko
GG Special Topics Track
Gradle is a general purpose, multi-platform build tool. Plugins allow for extending Gradle's core capabilities with reusable and targeted functionality. In this session, we'll discuss techniques and best practices for developing your own Gradle plugins by dissecting the structure, code, documentation and supporting infrastructure of an existing Gradle plugin. Gradle plugins are extremly simple to write. But there's far more to learn. Once you get beyond the basics, you will want to know about guidelines and best practices. In this session, we'll identify concepts and techniques that work well in practice by having a look at the Gradle Docker plugin (https://github.com/bmuschko/grad...). We'll mainly focus on the following topics:
* Brief introduction to Gradle plugin concepts
* Applying proven software engineering practices
* Separating capabilities from conventions
* Implementing convention over configuration
* Writing flexible custom tasks
* Depending on external libraries
* Exposing a custom DSL to plugin consumers
* Using the Gradle Wrapper
* Writing different types of tests for plugin code
* Publishing the plugin binaries
* Creating functional documentation
* Registering the plugin with Gradle's plugin portal
* Setting up Continuous Integration
