October 2016

Introduction

Welcome once again to the Gradle newsletter! We took the month of September off, but now we’re back with all the important news from the Gradle ecosystem, including events you should look out for in the near future.

In terms of the core build tool, the biggest news is the introduction of composite builds in Gradle 3.1. This feature gives you a whole new way to structure and manage projects in addition to the standard multi-project build approach. You can learn more about composite builds from one of our recent blog posts or from the Gradle 3.1 release notes. If you happen to be in the Bay Area, California, you can also see a presentation on composite builds that Hans Dockter and Szczepan Faber are giving at the Bay Area Gradle Users meetup on November 15th. And in related news, JetBrains have just added initial composite build support to IntelliJ IDEA!

That Bay Area meetup we just mentioned also has a talk on customizing build scan data. If you haven’t heard about build scans yet, we recommend that you check out another of our recent blog posts that introduces the concept. At heart, they’re a mechanism to profile and analyse your build, helping you identify issues and share the data across teams. What’s less well known is that you can incorporate extra data into build scans to provide additional insight into your specific build. To learn more about this topic, you can either attend the Bay Area meetup or—for the many of you that don’t live or work nearby—register for a webinar that takes place two days later on November 17th.

Finally, important changes are happening behind the scenes in the way that we—The Gradle Build Tool Team—interact with you and the rest of the community. These range from introducing a new, consistent look and feel—as showcased by this newsletter—to making it easier for you to raise and track issues in a transparent way via GitHub Issues—as explained by our most recent blog post. Equally as important is the new blog, which we’ve referenced several times already. We hope that it becomes a valuable asset that helps you keep up to date with what’s new in Gradle. The blog itself explains the rationale and intention best. If you’d like to subscribe to the blog, it’s available as an Atom feed.

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team

PS: We’d love to hear from you about any Gradle news that you consider relevant and that might be a useful addition to future newsletters. Just send us an email with the details at newsletter@gradle.com.

New Releases #

• Gradle 3.1 introduces initial composite build support, improvements to incremental build, faster dependency resolution, and initial Play 2.5.x support
• Gradle Script Kotlin has seen 3 releases: 0.3.2, 0.3.3 and 0.4.0. These bring closer feature parity with Groovy-based build scripts, initial multi-project build support, and custom Kotlin build logic in buildSrc and plugins.

IDE News #

• Buildship has seen two releases: 1.0.20 and 1.0.21. Both include bug fixes, but the latter also adds Eclipse Web Tools (WTP) support.
• IntelliJ IDEA adds initial support for composite builds

Featured Plugins #

• Google has introduced a new plugin for testing with and deploying to Google App Engine (not available on the plugin portal at the time of writing)

We’d like to help users stay aware of what’s happening in this important part of the Gradle ecosystem. To that end, if you know of an important new plugin or the release of a significant new version of an existing plugin, please let us know at newsletter@gradle.com.

Upcoming Events #

• Nov 15: Bay Area Gradle Users meetup on composite builds and customizing build scan data
• Nov 17: Webinar on Customizing Build Scans
• Nov 7-11: Devoxx Belgium
• Nov 28-Dec 1: G3 Summit—register with coupon code gradle150g3 for a $150 discount, and register by October 31st for an additional $150 off

Upcoming Trainings #

• Nov 8-9: Introduction to Gradle (Online - SOLD OUT)
• Nov 15-18: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for JVM (Online)
• Nov 29-30: Continuous Delivery Jumpstart (Online)
• Dec 1-2: Extending Gradle (Online)
• Dec 5-7: Gradle In-Depth (Berlin)
• Dec 6-7: Introduction to Gradle (Online)
• Dec 8-9: Gradle for Android (Online)
• Dec 12-14: Gradle In-Depth (San Francisco)
• Dec 13-14: Mastering Dependencies and Multi-Project Builds (Online)
• Dec 13-16: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for C/C++ (Online)
• Dec 15-16: Standardizing Enterprise Builds with Gradle (Online)

You can find a complete schedule of training events on our website.

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