January 2017

Introduction

Welcome to the January newsletter! The Gradle Build Tool Team has been working hard on the upcoming Gradle 3.4 release, which will contain a number of new features laser-focused on build performance. Each will be discussed in-depth with the release, but to give you a general idea of what’s coming, the changes fall into three major categories:

1. Compile avoidance, i.e. determining what not to build;
2. Incremental compilation improvements—in both robustness and performance;
3. A new Java Library Plugin that lets you separate dependencies into those needed for applications and those needed for libraries.

All will be revealed when Gradle 3.4 is released in early February. Stay tuned!

In parallel, the team has been working on our ongoing goal of growing the community of Gradle experts. To accomplish that, we recently offered two free online Introduction to Gradle training courses, and more are on the way. This month we’re taking the next step by offering our Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM course online for just $100 (previously $1100–1400). This is an extraordinary value, so please register as soon as you can. We expect the course to fill quickly.

If you prefer face-to-face training, we are also offering our Gradle In-Depth course in conjunction with this year’s Gradle Summit conference. This course combines elements from both the Introduction to Gradle and Advanced Gradle Fundamentals courses in a highly interactive, hands-on atmosphere.

And speaking of this year’s Gradle Summit conference, our flagship event is returning to Palo Alto this June, and we’re working hard to make it a memorable one. We’ll have much more to share as the event approaches, but in the meantime, both registration and our call for speakers are now open! Come to learn and share your experiences with the Gradle community.

As a final note, we’re excited about the growth in community involvement that’s followed our recent move to GitHub Issues. For one example, JaCoCo code coverage enforcement was added to Gradle 3.4 largely as a response to users voting for it. Please keep that feedback coming!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team

New Releases #

• Gradle 3.3 improves the performance of the gradle tasks command, provides support for Visual Studio 2015, and incorporates version 0.5.0 of Gradle Script Kotlin.
• Gradle Script Kotlin has shipped two additional releases in the meantime—0.6.0 and 0.7.0—both of which are major milestones toward achieving feature parity with Groovy-based Gradle build scripts.

Featured Plugins and Tools #

• Gradle command-line completion: Our own Eric Wendelin has created this long-requested capability. One of the challenges has always been how to make tab completion for Gradle both fast and comprehensive, and we’re delighted to report that Eric’s scripts achieve both of these goals. The scripts are available for both Bash and Zsh, and feature tab-completion of:
  • Tasks, including subproject tasks
  • Options, e.g. --parallel
  • Properties, e.g. -Dorg.gradle.jvmargs
• License Plugin: This helpful plugin by Jeroen van Erp scans source files for compliance with license headers, and can add license headers for files that do not have them. It even can produce a report on the licenses of a project’s dependencies. Thanks to Jeroen for the contribution!
• JProfiler: Anyone concerned with performance is probably aware of the excellent JProfiler tool. We want to thank the team at EJ Technologies for providing us with a team license, which has proven very useful in our recent performance improvements.

Upcoming Events #

• Feb 22–25: DevNexus 2017—if you’re planning to attend, please visit us at our booth! We’d love to hear about your experiences and let you know what’s upcoming with Gradle. Also, our own Gary Hale is giving a talk on Gradle Worst Practices: Common anti-patterns in Gradle builds, which should be both informative and entertaining.
• June 22–23: Gradle Summit 2017—this is the Gradle event of the year! Registration and call for speakers are open now. Use coupon code gsnews100 for an additional $100 off the already low early bird price!

Upcoming Trainings #

• Feb 14–17: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM (Online, $100)
• Mar 14–15: Introduction to Gradle (Online, FREE)
• Apr 25–28: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM (Online, $100)
• Jun 19–21: Gradle In-Depth (Palo Alto, $900)

Job Openings #

• Gradle Build Tool Software Engineer (Worldwide)
• Gradle Cloud Services Back-end Engineer (Worldwide)
• Gradle Cloud Services Front-end Engineer (Worldwide)
• Developer Advocate (San Francisco)

Views