Introduction

Welcome to the Gradle newsletter for April! We’ve had some major releases this month, along with the usual assortment of blog posts, articles, and features. Be sure to check out the newly-released list of sessions for the upcoming Gradle Summit!

Major News

• Gradle 3.5 now available! Gradle 3.5 is out, featuring:
  • All new build cache (see the blog post linked below, as well as the Build Cache user manual) which saves time by reusing outputs from previous executions of a task, resolving them either locally or remotely.
  • Improved console output in Gradle 3.5, showing a build status and parallel work-in-progress.
  • Gradle Plugin Management DSL Customize how plugins are resolved through the new plugin management DSL.

• Gradle Build Cache blog post Introduced in Gradle 3.5, the build cache reuses the outputs of Gradle tasks and shares task outputs between machines. This excellent blog post by Sterling Greene demonstrates how to use it and how it works. Using the cache can make significant differences in build times.

• Gradle Enterprise 2017.3 The big news in this release is the addition of a remote build cache backend, to maximize the benefit of the new build caching features in Gradle 3.5. The Gradle Enterprise build cache backend is easy to install, maintain, and is lightning fast. See the 2017.3 release notes for more on this and the new and improved build scans features.

• Gradle Script Kotlin 0.8, with a more consistent DSL, convenient and type-safe access to contributed project extensions and conventions, much better error reporting, bug fixes and, of course, the latest and greatest Kotlin release.

• The new gradle.com site has been overhauled to include comprehensive information about Gradle Enterprise and its build scan and build cache functionality. Let us know what you think of the new design.

• Sign up for office hours at the Gradle Summit The Gradle Engineering team will be holding office hours at the Gradle Summit.

• Preview the new Android Plugin New preview of the Android 2.5 plugin is now available, with major performance improvements, especially for large projects.

• New Getting Started Guides. Several new guides are now available to help you get started:
  • Building Java Libraries
  • Building Groovy Libraries
  • Building Java Web Applications
• New Topical Guides. Topical Guides go into more depth about specific topics of interest; in this case, plugins:
  • Designing Gradle Plugins
  • Writing Gradle Plugins

• Extremely Fast Android Builds with Gradle Recording of a presentation made by Hans Dockter (Founder of Gradle) and Xavier Ducrohet (Lead of Android Developer Tools at Google) at the San Francisco Android User Group

• Gradle’s Java Library Management This article in JavaMagazine describes how Gradle views dependency management and the challenges of working with Java libraries.

From the Community

• Migrate a Gradle Plugin from Groovy to Kotlin by Annyce Davis
• How to Create a Gradle Plugin in Kotlin by Karol Wrótniak

Upcoming Trainings

• Jun 6-9: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM Only $100 for this extensive, hands-on training course.

• Jun 19-21: Gradle In-Depth (Palo Alto) This course occurs immediate prior to the Gradle Summit. Those attending the Summit will receive a $200 discount on the training course.