New course released soon – Java Build Tools

Edit to add the course was indeed released on 26 September!

I’ve been working for the last few months on a course that many of our customers have asked for – a course that covers the two major Java build tools, Ant and Maven.

It will be available at VirtualPairProgrammers on 26 September 2013. I’ll be announcing it here and we’ll also be in touch if you’re on our mailing list, Facebook page and Twitter.

It has taken so long to record because a) I always take a long to time to record(!) but also b) both Ant and Maven contain so many little twists and turns, and I feel that any decent course should get at least a little bit deep.

I’m well aware that both Ant and Maven are a little bit old now (don’t get me wrong: they are both used in thousands of projects around the world – their value is enormous!), so I’ve spiced up the course with a third build tool – it’s much newer and much easier to use: Gradle.

Gradle isn’t used on as many projects, but I’m hoping it’s going to get more popular over time. Hopefully this course will help raise its profile a little!

The chapter list isn’t yet complete, but the structure will be:

  • Introduction: Why use build tools?
  • Part One: Ant. (around 3 hours across five chapters)
  • Part Two: Maven (again around 3 hours)
  • Part Three: Gradle (about 90 minutes and two chapters)

On all three parts of the course, I show how to create a build from scratch, and the end result is a web application deployed to Tomcat.

Once that’s released, I’m due to start a big new project…