One of the features of Gradle that I like the most is its ability to interoperate with other popular build tools such as ANT and MAVEN. You can integrate and call your existing ant tasks from Gradle as simple as calling ant.<taskname> and Gradle makes this possible  partly by leveraging Groovy’s AntBuilder functionality.

We have already seen than a Gradle task is an object and each task has a type. We also saw that the default type for all tasks is the DefaultTask. There are also other task types available with more specific methods and properties like Copy, Jar etc. We can also create our own custom task types if none of the built in types match our requirement.

Gradle tasks are actually objects and a task object has properties and methods just like any other object. By default, each new task receives a type of DefaultTask in Gradle (similar to how all classes are children of the Object class in Java). DefaultTask only contain the functionality required for them to interface with the Gradle project model and do not do any additional actions such as compiling or executing code. We already saw the important methods of DefaultTask. Now we will see the important properties.

Gradle tasks are actually objects and a task object has properties and methods just like any other object. By default, each new task receives a type of DefaultTask in Gradle (similar to how all classes are children of the Object class in Java). DefaultTask only contain the functionality required for them to interface with the Gradle project model and do not do any additional actions such as compiling or executing code.

Gradle lifecycle

Gradle lifecycle consist of three phases: initialization, configuration, and execution:

1. During Initialization, Gradle decides which projects are to participate in the build.

2. During Configuration, task objects are assembled into an internal object model, usually called the DAG (for directed acyclic graph).