April 2020

Welcome to the April 2020 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.

This newsletter covers the Gradle 6.4 RC1 release and the unveiling of Distributed Testing.

INFO: We have published an important security update for plugin authors publishing to the Plugin Portal.

Plugin News

The Test Retry Gradle Plugin is now 1.1.5 and includes some helpful bug fixes for Spock, JUnit, and TestNG users as well as integration with the soon to be released Distributed Testing Plugin.

The Maven Plugin Development Gradle Plugin, a new Gradle plugin for authoring Maven plugins, is now available on the Plugin Portal.

Projecktor users will be happy to know that a Gradle Projektor Plugin is available to publish test reports automatically to a Projektor server.

Ideas and Insights

JAXenter published Gradle 6: Dependency-Management reloaded an article (in German 🇩🇪) by Gradle engineer Jendrik Johannes about the exciting Dependency Management features in Gradle 6.0 and beyond.

Latest Gradle Release

The long-awaited support for Java Modules is coming in Gradle 6.4. The 6.4 release candidate also contains precompiled Groovy DSL script plugins for better build logic organization and a single lock file per project resulting in fewer lock files in projects using dependency locking.

Please try out Gradle 6.4 RC1 and file an issue on GitHub if you encounter any bugs.

New Technology: Distributed Testing

Does your team suffer from long feedback times because of slow running tests? Does your CI pipeline spend several hours executing tests?

In this webcast from Gradle engineers Marc Philipp and Benedikt Ritter, you’ll learn what strategies organizations currently employ to mitigate slow tests and how to speed up test execution by distributing tests across different remote agents, a feature coming soon in Gradle Enterprise 2020.2.

Upcoming Events

• May 07 9:00 am PT (2.5 hours): Hands-On Workshop: Maximize Developer Productivity with Fast and Reliable Gradle and Maven Builds
• May 12-13 8:30 am PT (4 hours each day): Training: Intro to Gradle
• Jun 19 9:00 (3.5 hours): Training: Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive

If you have some news you’d like us to share in the next issue, use #gradle on Twitter or send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team