Gradle Interview Questions and Answers


Gradle Interview Questions and Answers

Question: What is Gradle?

Answer:
Gradle is an open-source build automation system that builds upon the concepts of Apache
Ant and Apache Maven. Gradle has a proper programming language instead of XML
configuration file and the language is called ‘Groovy’.

Gradle uses a directed acyclic graph ("DAG") to determine the order in which tasks can be
run.


Gradle was designed for multi-project builds, which can grow to be quite large. It supports
incremental builds by intelligently determining which parts of the build tree are up to date,
any task dependent only on those parts does not need to be re-executed.




Question: What Are Advantages of Gradle?

Answer:
Gradle provides many advantages and here is a list

Declarative Builds: Probably one of the biggest advantages of Gradle is Groovy
language. Gradle provides declarative language elements. Which provide a build-by convention support for Java, Groovy, Web and Scala.

Structured Build: Gradle allows developers to apply common design principles to
their build. It provides a perfect structure for build, so that well-structured and easily
maintained, comprehensible build structures can be built.

Deep API: Using this API, developers can monitor and customize its configuration
and execution behaviors.

Scalability: Gradle can easily increase productivity, from simple and single project
builds to huge enterprise multi-project builds.

Multi-project builds: Gradle supports multi-project builds and also partial builds.

Build management: Gradle supports different strategies to manage project
dependencies.

First build integration tool − Gradle completely supports ANT tasks, Maven and lvy
repository infrastructure for publishing and retrieving dependencies. It also provides a
converter for turning a Maven pom.xml to Gradle script.

Ease of migration: Gradle can easily adapt to any project structure.

Gradle Wrapper: Gradle Wrapper allows developers to execute Gradle builds on
machines where Gradle is not installed. This is useful for continuous integration of
servers.




Free open source − Gradle is an open source project, and licensed under the
Apache Software License (ASL).

Groovy: Gradle's build scripts are written in Groovy, not XML. But unlike other
approaches this is not for simply exposing the raw scripting power of a dynamic
language. The whole design of Gradle is oriented towards being used as a language,
not as a rigid framework.

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Question: Why Gradle Is Preferred Over Maven or Ant?

Answer:
There isn't a great support for multi-project builds in Ant and Maven. Developers end up
doing a lot of coding to support multi-project builds.

Also having some build-by-convention is nice and makes build scripts more concise. With
Maven, it takes build by convention too far, and customizing your build process becomes a
hack.

Maven also promotes every project publishing an artifact. Maven does not support
subprojects to be built and versioned together. But with Gradle developers can have the flexibility of Ant and build by convention of Maven.

Groovy is easier and clean to code than XML. In Gradle, developers can define
dependencies between projects on the local file system without the need to publish
artifacts to repository.

Question: what is the difference between Gradle and Maven?

Answer:
The following is a summary of the major differences between Gradle and Apache Maven:

Flexibility: Google chose Gradle as the official build tool for Android; not because build
scripts are code, but because Gradle is modeled in a way that is extensible in the most
fundamental ways.

Both Gradle and Maven provide convention over configuration. However, Maven provides a
very rigid model that makes customization tedious and sometimes impossible.
While this can make it easier to understand any given Maven build, it also makes it
unsuitable for many automation problems. Gradle, on the other hand, is built with an
empowered and responsible user in mind.

Performance :
Both Gradle and Maven employ some form of parallel project building and parallel
dependency resolution. The biggest differences are Gradle's mechanisms for work
avoidance and incrementally.

Following features make Gradle much faster than Maven:
Incrementally: Gradle avoids work by tracking input and output of tasks and only
running what is necessary.




Build Cache:Reuses the build outputs of any other Gradle build with the same
inputs.

Gradle Daemon:A long-lived process that keeps build information "hot" in memory.

User Experience
Maven's has a very good support for various IDE's. Gradle's IDE support continues to
improve quickly but is not great as of Maven.

Although IDEs are important, a large number of users prefer to execute build operations
through a command-line interface. Gradle provides a modern CLI that has discoverability
features like `gradle tasks`, as well as improved logging and command-line completion.

Dependency Management
Both build systems provide built-in capability to resolve dependencies from configurable
repositories. Both are able to cache dependencies locally and download them in parallel.
As a library consumer, Maven allows one to override a dependency, but only by version.
Gradle provides customizable dependency selection and substitution rules that can be
declared once and handle unwanted dependencies project-wide. This substitution
mechanism enables Gradle to build multiple source projects together to create composite
builds.

Maven has few, built-in dependency scopes, which forces awkward module architectures in
common scenarios like using test fixtures or code generation. There is no separation
between unit and integration tests, for example. Gradle allows custom dependency scopes,
which provides better-modeled and faster builds.

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Question: What are Gradle Build Scripts?

Answer:
Gradle builds a script file for handling projects and tasks. Every Gradle build represents one
or more projects. A project represents a library JAR or a web application.

Question: What is Gradle Wrapper?

Answer:
The wrapper is a batch script on Windows, and a shell script for other operating systems.
Gradle Wrapper is the preferred way of starting a Gradle build.
When a Gradle build is started via the wrapper, Gradle will automatically download and run
the build.

Question: What is difference between Maven build.xml and Build.gradle script?

Answer:
Maven build.xml is xml document that includes start and end tags. Build.gradle is a Groovy script which has syntax similar to Java.

Question: How do I force Gradle to download dependencies always?

Answer:
you may refresh dependencies in your cache using the command line option --refresh-dependencies. Also deleting the cached files under ~/.gradle/caches would get the next Gradle build to download them again.


Question: What is Gradle Build Script File Name?

Answer:
This type of name is written in the format that is build.gradle. It generally configures the
Gradle scripting language.




Question: How To Add Dependencies In Gradle?

Answer:
In order to make sure that dependency for your project is added, you need to mention the
configuration dependency like compiling the block dependencies of the build.gradle file.

Question: What Is Dependency Configuration?

Answer:
Dependency configuration comprises of the external dependency, which you need to install
well and make sure the downloading is done from the web. There are some key features of
this configuration which are:

1. Compilation: The project which you would be starting and working on the first needs
to be well compiled and ensure that it is maintained in the good condition.
2. Runtime: It is the desired time which is required to get the work dependency in the
form of collection.
3. Test Compile: The dependencies check source requires the collection to be made
for running the project.
4. Test runtime: This is the final process which needs the checking to be done for
running the test that is in a default manner considered to be the mode of runtime

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Question: What Is Gradle Daemon?

Answer:
A daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather
than being under the direct control of an interactive user.

Gradle runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and uses several supporting
libraries that require a non-trivial initialization time.

As a result, it can sometimes seem a little slow to start. The solution to this
problem is the Gradle Daemon: a long-lived background process that
executes your builds much more quickly than would otherwise be the case.
We accomplish this by avoiding the expensive bootstrapping process as
well as leveraging caching, by keeping data about your project in memory.

Question: What Is Dependency Management in Gradle?

Answer:
Software projects rarely work in isolation. In most cases, a project relies on reusable
functionality in the form of libraries or is broken up into individual components to compose a
modularized system.
Dependency management is a technique for declaring, resolving and using dependencies
required by the project in an automated fashion.

Gradle has built-in support for dependency management and lives up the task of fulfilling
typical scenarios encountered in modern software projects.




Question: What Are Benefits Of Daemon in Gradle 3.0?

Answer:
Here are some of the benefits of Gradle daemon
1. It has good UX
2. It is very powerful
3. It is aware of the resource
4. It is well integrated with the Gradle Build scans
5. It has been default enabled

Question: What is the difference between settings.gradle and gradle.properties ?

Answer:
settings.gradle is a Groovy script that defines build related settings and not project related setting while in case of gradle.properties, file is a simple Java Properties file. It is a simple key-value store.


Question: What Is Gradle Multi-Project Build?

Answer:
Multi-project builds helps with modularization. It allows a person to concentrate on one area
of work in a larger project, while Gradle takes care of dependencies from other parts of the
project
A multi-project build in Gradle consists of one root project, and one or more subprojects
that may also have subprojects.
While each subproject could configure itself in complete isolation of the other subprojects, it
is common that subprojects share common traits.
It is then usually preferable to share configurations among projects, so the same
configuration affects several subprojects.

Question: What Is Gradle Build Task?

Answer:
Gradle Build Tasks is made up of one or more projects and a project represents what is
been done with Gradle.
Some key of features of Gradle Build Tasks are:
1. Task has life cycled methods [do first, do last]
2. Build Scripts are code
3. Default tasks like run, clean etc
4. Task dependencies can be defined using properties like dependsOn

Question: What is Gradle Build Life Cycle?

Answer:
Gradle Build life cycle consists of following three steps

-Initialization phase: In this phase the project layer or objects are organized
-Configuration phase: In this phase all the tasks are available for the current build and a
dependency graph is created
-Execution phase: In this phase tasks are executed.

Question: What is Gradle Java Plugin?

Answer:
The Java plugin adds Java compilation along with testing and bundling capabilities to the
project. It is introduced in the way of a SourceSet which act as a group of source files
complied and executed together.




Question: What is Dependency Configuration?

Answer:
A set of dependencies is termed as dependency configuration, which contains some
external dependencies for download and installation.

Here are some key features of dependency configuration are:

Compile:
The project must be able to compile together
Runtime:
It is the required time needed to get the dependency work in the collection.
Test Compile:
The check source of the dependencies is to be collected in order to run the project.
Test Runtime:
The final procedure is to check and run the test which is by default act as a runtime mode.

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My Name is Ankur Jain and I am currently working as Automation Test Architect.I am ISTQB Certified Test Manager,Certified UI Path RPA Developer as well as Certified Scrum Master with total 12 years of working experience with lot of big banking clients around the globe.I love to Design Automation Testing Frameworks with Selenium,Appium,Protractor,Cucumber,Rest-Assured, Katalon Studio and currently exploring lot in Dev-OPS as well. I am currently staying in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Please Connect with me through Contact Us page of this website.

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