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NFJS2025

Gradle Workshop

The Gradle build tool has been adopted by the vast majority of open source projects and is growing rapidly in industry as well. Gradle provides a powerful DSL for customizing and managing your build, with flexible configuration features and sophisticated dependency management. Gradle is also actively supported by a commercial entity, and in partnership with companies like Netflix and LinkedIn is currently being optimized for performance.

This workshop is designed to get you started on Gradle, from its basic capabilities up through advanced techniques like build scans, the build cache, and resolutions strategies.

Topics will include:

  • Projects and tasks
  • Initialization, configuration, and execution times
  • File system capabilities
  • Incremental builds
  • Script and binary plugins
  • Dependency management
  • Multi-project builds
  • Build scans
  • The build cache
  • Creating your own plugin

Kenneth Kousen

About Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.

His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.

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