Difference between `tasks.named('test')` and `test`

Question

I noticed that https://start.spring.io now uses

tasks.named('test') {
    useJUnitPlatform()
}

When it used to be

test {
    useJUnitPlatform()
}

I was wondering why the change? The second one seems cleaner even on the IDE.

These are both groovy Gradle no Kotlin

Answer 1

This change has been made to declare tasks lazily, see this Gradle page describing the "Configure avoidance" principles : https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/task_configuration_avoidance.html

Especialy this part which explains the difference between your two examples ( someTask is test in your case):

Beware of the hidden eager task realization. There are many ways that a task can be configured eagerly. For example, configuring a task using the task name and a DSL block will cause the task to immediately be created when using the Groovy DSL

// Given a task lazily created with
tasks.register("someTask")

// Some time later, the task is configured using a DSL block
someTask {
     // This causes the task to be created and this configuration to be executed immediately
}

Instead use the named() method to acquire a reference to the task and configure it:

tasks.named("someTask") {

}

( related commit Spring initializr project : https://github.com/spring-io/initializr/commit/27fc9d40672496c93742f562b13544d9a27cd484 )