The second session of the day that I attended after completing my Mockito talk was World Class Builds with Gradle. I debated going as I already use gradle and even gave Michael a bit of advertisement by showing some of the early attendees to my session my gradle build file, however I decided to go… I might learn something new and I could give a fellow OCIer some feedback on his talk. 
One aspect I liked of his presentation was he really started by breaking down how tasks work in gradle and the basic building blocks of how they work in the scope of the build file. for the most part, I felt this flowed pretty smoothly with the gradle user guide.
At first I didn’t think show the example of using ant style build in gradle was really a good idea… when I saw it, I thought that this is really just as verbose as ant but just written in groovy instead of xml. But what was good about showing a gradle build using almost nothing but ant tasks was how one could migrate from ant to gradle in the interim and just use the same ant tasks until they “gradlefy it”. And when he did show how easy it is to set a build up with gradle, it was a breath of fresh air.
Overall I felt like it gave a good overview of gradle and how to use it not just for building java apps, but he also gave a good real example of how you might migrate from something like ant to gradle.
