Hubert Klein Ikkink was born in 1973 and currently lives in Tilburg, Netherlands, with his beautiful wife and gorgeous children. He is also known as mrhaki, which is simply the first letters of his name prepended with mr. He studied information systems and management at Tilburg University. After finishing his studies, he started working at a company specialized in knowledge-based software. There he started writing his first Java software (yes, an applet!) in 1996. During these years, his focus switched from applets to servlets to Java Enterprise Edition applications to Spring-based software.
In 2008, he wanted to have fun when writing software. The larger projects he was working on were more about writing configuration XML files and tuning performance and less about real development in his eyes, so he started to look around and noticed that Groovy was a very good language to learn. He could still use the existing Java code and libraries and use his Groovy classes in Java. The learning curve isn't steep and to support his learning phase, he wrote interesting Groovy facts on his blog with the title Groovy Goodness. He posts small articles with a lot of code samples to understand how to use Groovy. Since November 2011, he is also a DZone Most Valuable Blogger (MVB), where DZone post his blog items on their site. During these years, he also wrote about other subjects such as Grails, Gradle, Spock, Asciidoctor, and Ratpack.
Hubert was invited to speak at conferences such as Gr8Conf in Copenhagen, Minneapolis, and Greach, Madrid. Also, he gave presentations at Java conferences such as JFall in Netherlands and Javaland in Germany.
Hubert works for a company called JDriven in Netherlands. JDriven focuses on technologies that simplify and improve development of enterprise applications. Employees of JDriven have years of experience with Java and related technologies and are all eager to learn about new technologies. Hubert works on projects using Grails and Java combined with Groovy and Gradle.
It was a great honor to be asked by Packt Publishing to write this book. I knew it beforehand that it would be a lot of work and somehow needed to be combined with my daytime job. I couldn't have written the book without the help of a lot of people and I want to thank all these people.
First of all, I would like to thank my family for supporting me while writing the book. They gave me space and time to write the book. Thank you for your patience and a big kiss to Kim, Britt, Liam, and Chloë, I love you. Of course, I would also like to thank all the people at Gradle Inc. for making Gradle such a great build tool.
Finally, I would like to thank the great staff at Packt Publishing. Shweta Pant kept me on schedule and made sure everything was submitted on time. I would also like to thank all the editors for reviewing the book. They really helped me to keep focus and be concise with the text.