Building portlets with Gradle

I’m trying to build a Vaadin 7 portlet using gradle with the gradle-vaadin plugin as my build tool. Ideally I would like to test the UI in a servlet environment with mock data using the vaadinRun task. It seems like the only difference, if I’m understanding correctly, is the web.xml descriptor. I’m fairly new at gradle, so I’m wondering if anyone has an opinion on how to accomplish this.