Foreword

When you create a new technology like Gradle, one of the most critical stages of development has nothing to do with writing code. Once the initial versions of your project are used by thousands of developers and a community starts to assemble around it, the challenge becomes communicating with a much larger audience of users who will use the project and pass judgment on its merits, and growing the size of the community ten-fold or a thousand-fold. Gradle has already amassed a large audience, and we’ve seen tremendous growth over the last two years, but we’re getting ready for a still larger influx of end-users.

Therefore, the importance of having a good book cannot be overstated. Developers with a range of skills and abilities need to be able to pick up a book that’s easy to understand and which can impart both the syntax and the philosophy behind the tool. Only then will they be able to confidently grow the community that can educate itself using a single, authoritative reference for Gradle. Gradle in Action is that book. Additionally, this book gives new Gradle users a very good glimpse into how Gradle fits into a larger view of continuous delivery.

Benjamin is the sort of expert that you hope emerges from an open source community. He has been a long term Gradle contributor and is the author of several popular Gradle plugins. He’s both a communicator and a developer. Benjamin has the rare ability to dive into the core details of a particularly challenging development problem and then explain the tool to end-users. We’re happy that he has recently joined Gradleware and is now part of the Gradle development team.

I hope you enjoy the book as well as working with Gradle. May your software delivery process become both fun and efficient.

HANS DOCKTER
FOUNDER OF GRADLE AND GRADLEWARE