Gradle in Android Development

Hey Folks, This article is for freshers who want to know why Gradle is important for Android Development.

Pc: google

Gradle is an open-source build automation tool. Gradle is basically about what you want to build and how to build it quickly.

In Android Domain, Gradle is responsible for compiling source code, creating a dependency for the app, generating APK files, and performing other tasks for example creating APK based on environment (prod, INT) etc.

Gradle uses a Groovy or Kotlin-based domain-specific language (DSL) to define the build configuration.

With Gradle, you can define project-level build scripts (build. Gradle) and module-level build scripts (also build. Gradle) to specify the settings and dependencies for your Android project.

Gradle Design is based on these topics

1. High Performance

How does High-performance work in software development?

If you are building something and every time you don't need to download from the server, instead you can use cache to avoid the download issue, here you can make your build process higher, correct?

How does High-performance matter here in Gradle?

By using Gradle, we can use caches in various places, and we can reuse output from previous builds by the concept of shared build cache. Even we can reuse output from other machines as well.

This is the power of Gradle to make our Android build process easier and faster.

JVM Foundation:

Gradle runs on the top of the JVM platform. This is the best thing, if you are familiar with JAVA, you can easily understand Gradle.

IDE support

Several major IDEs provide interaction with Gradle builds, Android Studio of course, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, VS Code, and NetBeans.

Extensibility

you can modify the Gradle according to your project requirement.

Next Question maybe,

What all major things are included in Gradle?

1. Gradle Wrapper — when you start creating a project in Android, you will find one file in the Gradle script which is Gradle-wrapper.properties

Q. What is this Gradle-wrapper.properties file does?

This file allows us to define and distribute a specific version of Gradle along with our project.

The wrapper ensures that everyone working on the project uses the same grade version, eliminating compatibility issues and simplifying the setup process.

Don't confuse with the words, visualization will be like this

distributionBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
distributionPath=wrapper/dists
distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-7.4-bin.zip
zipStoreBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
zipStorePath=wrapper/dists

2. Gradle Build Cache — Gradle incorporates a build cache that stores the outputs of tasks, such as compiled classes or generated resources.

When a task is executed, Gradle checks if the inputs and configuration have changed since the last build and retrieves the output from the cache if it’s available.

This caching mechanism further enhances build performance.

3. Plugin Architecture — when we want to extend the other libs or some specific configuration on the app, we can use the plugins to provide the extended functionality on our app.

4. Declarative Build Scripts — Gradle uses a declarative syntax that allows you to define the desired state of your build rather than specifying the exact steps to achieve it. This approach makes build scripts more readable, maintainable, and less prone to errors.

This is about Gradle in Android Development and how this is an important factor in Android.

See you in the next Article “Kotlin DSL Migration”