Summary

We started off this chapter by building a very simple Java project. We saw how the intelligent conventions of the java plugin helped us keep the build file concise. Then, we added unit tests to this project and included the JUnit library from the Maven central repository. We made the tests fail and checked the reports to see the explanation. Then, we saw how the application's distribution can be created using the application plugin. Finally, we saw the idea and eclipse plugins that help us generate the IDE-specific files for our project.

Overall, we realized how powerful the plugin system in Gradle is. Gradle, out-of-the-box, ships with many interesting plugins, but we are not forced to use any of them. We will build a web application in the next chapter and also learn how configurations and dependency management works..