Portland Java User Group: Gradle to Crave January 18, 2011

This month's topic: Gradle

Come to the session if you want to participate in learning more about Gradle. Gradle is a powerful layer of Groovy built on top of a number of established tools and libraries. Smart guys have borrowed from the pioneering work of Ant, Maven, Gant, Buildr and come up with an expressive, concise, and convention-rich build tool for the Java family.

For this session, there won't be any slides. I'm also not going to stand up and talk at you. Instead, I'm going to rely heavily on your involvement. I'll start with an introduction to Gradle, and then very quickly go into using it in practice. After a few minutes of that I'll open it up to go wherever we're most interested in. I'm not a Gradle expert, yet I believe that my Groovy background in conjunction with a few days of earnest usage have taught me a lot. This session will rely heavily on an internet connection, and we'll be googling for answers together if need be.

Do this ahead of time:

What is your intention for the session? Spend some time deliberately focusing on what it is you want out of the session. Bring that will you and share it with us. It will help us all focus on what's important and go some way to helping you get the most out of the session. Also, go have a quick read about Gradle on their website. That will save us all some time, help us get to the interesting details sooner, and be a good source of informed questions for you.

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Speaker: Merlyn Albery-Speyer

I'm Merlyn, a Portland-based programmer with strong ties to both Agile PDX and Groovy. I'm also a member of an Agile team at YesMail, and I blog under the handle "curious attempt bunny".

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PJUG meetings start with some time to eat and socialize (pizza and beverages are provided), followed by the featured speaker, then Q&A, discussion, sometimes a drawing to give away swag. :)

Though we like knowing how many people to expect, you don't *have* to RSVP, on Upcoming or otherwise. Go ahead and just show up!

Many people also go for a drink and further discussion following the meeting, at a location determined ad hoc (lately, Trees restaurant in the same building).

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