Introduction

Welcome to the July Newsletter!

We hope you are able to enjoy a nice vacation this time of year. There’s quite a reading list below we think you’ll enjoy whether you’re seeking some sun or escaping it.

In this issue, we’ll cover new releases Gradle 4.9 and Gradle Enterprise 2018.3, as well as new guides.

From the community

There are so many plugins and posts to feature that we had to give them their own subsections! Keep sending your creations to newsletter@gradle.com.

Blog Posts

• Productivity at Scale: How We Improved Build Time by 400% at LinkedIn — The LinkedIn Dev Tools Team describe how they migrated their Play applications from SBT to Gradle and the outcomes.
• Moving Your Gradle Build Scripts to Kotlin — David Schreiber-Ranner advocates the best practice of moving build logic to buildSrc, and demonstrates authoring tasks in Kotlin to achieve higher maintainability.
• Building a Kafka Connector with Gradle — Matt Schroeder shows you how to assemble a Kafka Connector uber JAR using the Shadow Plugin.
• How to debug Gradle Plugins with IntelliJ — A visual walkthrough of configuring IntelliJ IDEA and Gradle to interactively debug Gradle plugins by Stefan M.
• Writing Githooks in Kotlin — In this blog post, Juan Ignacio Vimberg uses KScript to develop a git pre-push hook, then uses Gradle to allow automatic installation. Very clever.

Plugins

• GoogleContainerTools/jib-gradle-plugin — Jib is a fast and simple Docker image builder developed by Google.
• rackerlabs/gradle-linkchecker-plugin — A well-written Gradle plugin to check links in HTML files, featuring lots of configuration options.
• aim42/htmlSanityCheck — Gradle plugin that provides basic sanity checking for HTML files.
• gradle-clojure — A new Clojure and ClojureScript plugin that aims to combine the benefits of Leiningen and Boot and Gradle.
• phatblat/SwiftPM-Plugin — Gradle plugin for the Swift Package Manager
• konifar/gradle-unused-resources-remover-plugin — Gradle Plugin that removes unused resources in Android projects.
• szpak/gradle-pitest-plugin — Gradle plugin for PIT Mutation Testing.
• OSSIndex/ossindex-gradle-plugin — Dependency audit plugin for Gradle using the OSS Index REST API.

Gradle 4.9

Gradle 4.9 was recently released, and addresses 2 of your highest voted Gradle issues:

• CLI arguments for JavaExec tasks
• Project dependencies having 2+ publications

It also features incubating lazy task APIs, an improved dependency insight report, new publishing docs and more.

Details available in the release notes.

Gradle Enterprise 2018.3

Gradle Enterprise 2018.3 features:

• Full buildSrc insights in build scans
• Performance measurements for lifecycle hooks (e.g. afterEvaluate)
• Automated deployment of build cache nodes
• First-class Kubernetes support

Read the release notes to learn more.

New Gradle guides

We are pleased to introduce 2 brand new Gradle guides:

• Migrating build logic from Groovy to Kotlin
• Building Spring Boot 2 Applications with Gradle

Please let us know what other guides would be most helpful to you by filing your suggestions on the gradle/guides GitHub repo.

Upcoming online training

• Aug 7-8: Introduction to Gradle
• Sep 6: Build Cache Deep Dive
• Sep 11-14: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM
• Anytime: Maximizing Developer Productivity with Gradle Enterprise

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team