August 2018

Introduction

Welcome to the August Newsletter!

This issue covers a faster and tidier Gradle 4.10, the last release before Gradle 5.0.

Gradle Enterprise 2018.4 will help you prepare for Gradle 5.0 with new deprecations inspections and deeper performance profiling.

There’s not just Gradle 5.0 to look forward to. It’s also time to get ready for Kotlin DSL 1.0 — version 1.0 RC is available and ready for your feedback.

Aside, Gradle Inc. has several new open positions available. Please check them out if you’re interested.

From the community #

Some interesting new posts and plugins from this month for your reading list.

Blog Posts #

• Gradle Improvements in IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2 — Exciting improvements to IntelliJ Gradle support including Groovy build script debugging, presented by Trisha Gee.
• Execute Kotlin Script with Gradle — In this post, Simon Wirtz shows you how to organize multiple Kotlin scripts as Gradle tasks and make them easily executable.
• Ad-hoc Plugins with Gradle — Eugene Petrenko shows ways to reuse Gradle configuration and how to leverage small plugins for improved build simplicity.
• Gradle, Jupiter, Kotlin and Mockito aboard the same boat — An annotated example demonstrating how to configure Gradle, JUnit, Kotlin, and Mockito together in a project by Olivier Perez.

Plugins #

• PandoraMedia/hydra — A high-performance parallel testing plugin and companion server application for Gradle.
• bmuschko/gradle-docker-plugin — A new, improved version of this popular plugin is released; now featuring a comprehensive user guide.
• aim42/htmlSanityCheck — An HTML sanity checker Gradle plugin that detects missing images, dead links, and duplicate anchors.
• akaita/easylauncher-gradle-plugin — Add a different ribbon to each of your Android app variants.
• ImFlog/schema-registry-plugin — Interact with Confluent Schema-Registry using this Gradle plugin.
• browserstack/browserstack-gradle-plugin — Run and debug Espresso tests using BrowserStack.

Have a blog post or plugin you’d like to see featured here? Just send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Kotlin DSL 1.0 release candidate #

Kotlin DSL version 1.0 RC is now available; major updates from v0.18 include configuration avoidance, buildSrc refactoring propagation to the IDE, and the last set of backward compatibility-breaking changes until Gradle 6.0.

We want your feedback before Gradle 5.0, which is next. Please read this blog post for guidance on trying Gradle’s Kotlin DSL and submitting issues.

Gradle Enterprise 2018.4 #

Deprecated Gradle APIs will be removed in Gradle 5.0. Fortunately, Gradle Enterprise 2018.4 features a new Deprecations view that makes it easy to find and address usages of deprecated Gradle APIs, not only in your build but also in external plugins applied to your build.

In addition to itemizing deprecations, this release also features:

• Deeper configuration time profiling
• Information about repositories used to resolve dependencies
• Individual build cache entry inspection and deletion

You can learn more in the Gradle Enterprise 2018.4 release notes.

Gradle 4.10 #

The Gradle 4.10 release contains these highly-anticipated features:

• Incremental Java compilation by default
• Periodic Gradle cache cleanup
• Kotlin DSL 1.0 RC
• Plugins DSL support for SNAPSHOT plugin versions

These and other improvements are explained in the Gradle 4.10 release notes. Onward to Gradle 5.0!

Upcoming online training #

• Aug 30: Optimize your CI Pipeline: Hands-on with The Gradle Build Tool Team
• Sep 6: Build Cache Deep Dive
• Sep 11-14: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM
• Sep 18-19: Introduction to Gradle
• Anytime: Maximizing Developer Productivity with Gradle Enterprise
• Anytime: Improving Android and Java Build Performance

Gradle job opportunities #

Gradle Inc. is growing quickly. Will you help us shape the future of software automation?

• Gradle Build Tool Engineering — especially for distributed builds and dependency management
• Solutions Engineering — Field Engineer, Onboarding Engineer, and Solutions Consultant
• Developer Experience — Developer Advocate and Technical Writer
• Operations and HR Coordinator

The details of these and other open positions available at gradle.com/careers.

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team

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