Introduction

Welcome to the January Newsletter!

Happy new year from The Gradle Build Tool Team! In this issue, we’ll cover what’s new in Gradle 4.5, experimental new C++ plugins for Gradle, and some fresh new Gradle docs.

Gradle 4.5

Gradle 4.5 was released, and features:

• Faster up-to-date checks
• Memory usage optimizations
• Stable build cache support for C and C++
• Kotlin DSL v0.14
• Signing artifacts with gpg-agent

Here’s a 42-second video demonstrating what’s new in Gradle 4.5.

Experimental new C++ plugins

In addition to recent improvements to incremental compilation and build caching for C and C++, Gradle is proud to introduce 4 new experimental C++ plugins for building and testing native projects. From the introductory blog post:

The plugins will eventually replace the software model plugins and take advantage of many new features baked into Gradle core, such as a rich dependency management engine, build cache, composite builds, finer grained parallel execution, build scans, and more.

The post also shows samples for:

• Building C++ libraries with the cpp-library plugin
• Testing with Google Test and XCTest with the cpp-unit-test plugin
• XCode integration with the xcode plugin
• Running C++ applications with the cpp-application Plugin

Your feedback would be very helpful as we stabilize these new plugins. Please try the plugins out and file issues in the gradle-native repository.

Fresh new docs

You shared your thoughts on Gradle documentation, and now it’s time to show you some of the improvements based on your feedback.

• More examples and use-case oriented docs on dependency management, the Gradle wrapper, command-line interface, and other popular topics.
• Improved navigation showing where you are and linking to other areas of the documentation.
• Mobile-friendliness and faster page speed.
• “Edit this page” link that makes it easy to suggest changes.

There is still a ways to go. Please continue to file issues and let us know what would make Gradle easier to understand and use. A special “thank you” to those who’ve helped out by using the “Edit this page” links.

Community posts and projects

• Mastering Gradle caching and incremental builds — In this post, Fedor Korotkov explains how Gradle caching works and how you can make builds much faster using Gradle’s new build cache.
• Using Java 9 modularization to ship zero-dependency native apps — Steve Perkins shows an example native application built using Java 9 modules and jlink.
• Annotation processing with apt and Gradle in Eclipse — Part of an extensive tutorial for using Gradle with Eclipse, this section walks you through Gradle configuration for efficient use of the AutoValue annotation processor.
• Building Go projects made easy with Gradle — In this talk, Benjamin Muschko discusses how Gradle can streamline Go project builds.
• Gradle scripts for Kotlin lovers — A primer for adopting Gradle Kotlin DSL, providing guidelines, examples, and lessons learned.
• Gradle Initializr — A web-based Gradle project generator. Supports various project types, DSLs, and Gradle versions.

Have something you’d like to see featured here? Just send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Upcoming online training

• Feb 13-16: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM
• Mar 13-14: Introduction to Gradle
• Anytime: Maximizing Developer Productivity with Gradle Enterprise

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team