March 2025

Introduction

If you’re reading this, consider joining us for a webinar on March 27! In this talk, Stefan Wolf, Principal Software Engineer at Gradle, will discuss troubleshooting local and CI builds for Gradle and Apache Maven. He’ll also show what actually happens when various build and test failures arise and the tools available for solving them rapidly. RSVP here.

From the Community #

New Posts #

• Optimizing Gradle Build Support in nixpkgs by Benedikt Ritter
• Maybe Don’t Run - Optional Tasks in Gradle by Aurimas Liutikas
• Gradle Plugins Best Practices about centralizing plugin declarations, transitive and classpath dependencies by Tim Malseed
• That’s Gonna Leave A Mark - Gradle Plugin Markers by Aurimas Liutikas
• NixOS Meets Enterprise Java: A Cautionary Tale by Benedikt Ritter
• 7 Gradle Features Every Android Developer Should Master by Artem Asoyan
• Great Gradle Goodies: Code Formatting with Spotless by Michael Kutz

New Videos #

• Gradle, The Ultimate Delegator by Tom Koptel at Android Budapest
• Fighting the Elephant - Gradle Convention Plugins by Duncan McGregor
• Trisha Gee’s Expert Advice for Young Developers and her Gradle Journey, at Tales from the jar side

New Releases #

• The Reproducible Builds Gradle plugin by GradleX is now endorsed by Reproducible Builds, a site that promotes this best software development practice.
• New Garbage Collector Report Plugin by Iñaki Villar. It collects GC metrics based on the GC logs generated during the build, generates a console report, or CSV file, or submits the data to Develocity or Build Scan.

From the Gradle Team #

State of the Configuration Cache - Towards Gradle 9 #

As Gradle 9.0 approaches, we’re sharing updates on the Configuration Cache—a key feature of the release and one that significantly improves configuration time for large projects. This release will make the Configuration Cache the preferred execution mode, with the goal of enabling it by default in Gradle 10.0. We’ve made substantial progress in 2024, with massive performance and compatibility reporting improvements. As Gradle Fellow Tony Robalik noted:

“I’m excited about all the work Gradle has done to make the Configuration Cache stable and the preferred mechanism for running builds. At work, we’ve observed that enabling Configuration Cache globally will recover roughly 4 years of lost engineering time annually. The configuration cache also lays the foundation for Isolated Projects, which has been an eagerly awaited feature since Gradle first announced it several years ago!”
- Tony Robalik, Gradle Fellow and a Senior Software Engineer at Square

Learn more in our recent blog post!

New Solution Page for Gradle Build Tool and Develocity #

As you may have seen, we recently published multiple new solution pages on Gradle.com, our company website. They cover integrations between our Develocity and Build Scan services with various build tools, CI Systems, IDEs, programming languages, test frameworks, and specifications. Of course, there’s a dedicated page for Gradle Build Tool, check it out!

Monthly Gradle Build Tool Webinars #

Starting in March, we’ll be hosting more frequent Gradle Build Tool webinars on Gradle’s webinar platform. We will also continue hosting community events, streaming them to social media as we have in the past. The full schedule will be published soon, and we’re excited to announce the first two webinars:

• March 27 - Troubleshooting Gradle and Maven builds with Develocity with Stefan Wolf - a principal engineer working on many of Gradle’s open-source components and the lead engineer for the Build Scan integration
• April 24 - Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds with Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene from the Declarative Gradle and JVM teams

See all upcoming Gradle events and webinars on our Events page!

GSoC 2025 - Contributor Applications start March 24! #

As we prepare for Google Summer of Code 2025, we’re looking for potential contributors. Thanks to everyone who has already reached out to the team! The applications open on March 24, and the deadline for final applications is April 8.

Below is a list of Gradle-related project ideas that we’re excited to mentor under the Kotlin Foundation. We also welcome any new project proposals you’d like to submit:

• 🔍 Clean and actionable reporting for Gradle code quality plugins for Kotlin
• 📦 Maven Central publishing plugin for Gradle with new APIs
• 🚅 Improving Configuration Cache and lock contention in key Gradle plugins
• 🔌 Gradle Convention plugin for developing Jenkins Plugins
• 📓 Kotlin DSL documentation samples test framework
• 👷 Build Server Protocol: add Kotlin support (together with JetBrains)

If you’re interested in participating, join the #gsoc channels on the Gradle Community Slack and the Kotlin Foundation Slack.

Kotlin Foundation - Annual Report #

The Kotlin Foundation recently published its 2024 report, which offers an overview of last year’s initiatives and milestones within the Kotlin ecosystem. The report covers Kotlin 2.0 and the K2 compiler, outreach, and grants programs, and new foundation members and committees. These efforts have continued to foster community engagement and drive the ecosystem’s growth. Gradle is happy to contribute to a number of activities, including serving on the foundation’s committees.

So what have we been up to? In 2024, we continued our membership in the Education Committee and participated in Google Summer of Code under the umbrella of the foundation. We supported Kotlin-focused events, including droidCon, user groups, and Kotlinconf. In December, we also joined the Ecosystem Committee to facilitate ecosystem partnerships with the Kotlin Foundation members and the developer community. As part of our open source support program, Gradle provides a free Develocity instance for the Kotlin project. Kotlin—along with the Kotlin compiler, Ktor, and other core projects—rely on Gradle Build Tool and Develocity for speeding up builds and tests and getting insights into failures, flaky tests, and historical performance trends

We’re proud to participate in the Kotlin Foundation and support these projects and their ongoing success. See the full report here.

Upcoming Events #

Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you and discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, or Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE).

• March 25, DPE Tour Palo Alto—This in-person event at Meta HQ focused on Developer Productivity Engineering and Developer Experience, featuring talks from Meta, Microsoft, Uber, and Gradle (with our very own Trisha Gee).
• March 27, Troubleshooting Gradle and Maven builds with Develocity (Online) - Webinar with Stefan Wolf, a principal engineer working on many of Gradle’s open source components and the lead for the Build Scan integration.
• April 10-11, Android Makers by droidcon - Louis Jacomet and Paul Merlin will discuss Gradle’s scalability for Android projects. Are build times breaking your flow? Learn how to make them fast!
• April 24, Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds (Online) - Webinar with Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene discussing the latest EAP 3 release and what Declarative Gradle brings to Gradle developer experience.
• May 17 - Swiss Open Education Day - Oleg Nenashev will present on mentorship programs in open source and academia, including stories from Gradle’s programs
• May 21-23, Kotlinconf - Meet the Gradle Build Tool team at the Gradle and Kotlin Foundation booths! Alex Semin and Rodrigo Oliveira will also present on Fast inner dev loops for Kotlin builds with Gradle.
• June 23-27, PlatformCon (Online) - Oleg Nenashev will speak about using Testcontainers and API mocking for Golang projects (and yes, you can do the same with Java and Gradle!)
• August 03-10, JCrete - Oleg Nenashev will attend this conference, which will focus on the Java tooling ecosystem and developer productivity.
• September 23-24, DPE Summit by Gradle - Registration is now open! Grab your early-bird ticket while they last and throw your hat in the ring to speak.

Featured Event: Troubleshooting Gradle and Maven builds with Develocity #

How much time do you spend each day troubleshooting your builds and tests? If you’re like most developers, you regularly see dependencies fail, infrastructure explodes, nonstop flaky tests, and Checkstyle turning into Gandalf (“you shall not pass”). That’s okay, right? At least everything works on your machine. Sarcasm aside, there are many points of failure. We need proper tools to identify and fix the root cause as quickly and easily as possible.

In this talk by Stefan Wolf, Principal Software Engineer at Gradle, we’ll take a look at troubleshooting local and CI builds for Gradle and Apache Maven. We’ll dive deep into observing what is actually happening when various build and test failures arise, and the tools at your disposal for solving them rapidly.

You can learn more about the upcoming webinar and RSVP here.

Spread the Word #

We invite you to share news from this newsletter—Let’s help the authors and contributors! As always, this newsletter is also published in our Gradle Newsletter Archive, and you can share it as a link or subscribe via RSS.

Finally, the Call for Proposals for the March newsletter edition is already open.

Views