The Java plugin

In Chapter 1, Getting Started with Gradle, we already created a Java project called FirstGradleProject. However, the discussion was only limited to the Eclipse plugin tasks. We did not discuss anything about the Java plugin. The Java plugin is part of the Gradle core API, which enables us to build a Java project with supporting tasks such as compiling the Java code, testing the code, assembling binaries to create libraries, and more. It supports conventions over configuration. This means, if we use this plugin, some default configuration is already available to the developer, such as the location of the source code, the location of the compiled class file, and the jar naming convention. Unless we want to override these configurations, we do not need to write a lot of code to work with the default tasks and properties.

To apply the Java plugin, we add a single statement to the build file:

apply plugin: 'java'

Internally, the apply method of the Java plugin is invoked with the...