Introduction

Welcome to the September Newsletter!

We’re looking forward to sweater weather all over the world. Get cozy with your favorite pumpkin spice treat and enjoy the latest developments in Gradle and Android.

In this issue, we’ll cover experimental new source dependencies in Gradle, Android Gradle Plugin 3.2, and upcoming events.

From the community

New posts and projects from this month for your reading enjoyment.

• DIY Gradle build optimization — A most excellent guide to Gradle build performance optimization by Alex Saveau.
• Kotlin/Native 0.8.2 allows Gradle projects directly in CLion — Eugene Petrenko writes what’s new in Kotlin/Native and shows off exciting new Gradle project support in CLion!
• Nested Composite Builds with Gradle — How Andres Almiray improved the development cycle relating to JSR377 using nested composite builds in Gradle 4.10.
• Build a Basic CRUD App in Android with Kotlin — A step-by-step guide to building both client-side Android app and server-side Spring Boot API using Kotlin by Karl Penzhorn.
• ksoichiro/awesome-gradle — A curated list of awesome Gradle plugins and resources.
• Merging JUnit reports using Gradle Kotlin DSL — Patrick Lehner shares a Kotlin DSL build configuration he used to merge per-suite JUnit reports into a single one.
• novoda/gradle-static-analysis-plugin — Easy setup of static analysis tools for Android and Java projects.
• Vaadin 11 now available with Gradle support — John Ahlroos worked with Vaadin to contribute Gradle support. This post gives an overview of this and what else is in Vaadin 11.
• Gradle Daemon on Jenkins — Your Jenkins CI builds will be much faster using the Gradle Daemon, and Andre Steingress shows you how to keep the Daemon alive between jobs in this post.

Have a blog post or plugin you’d like to see featured here? Just send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Source dependencies in Gradle

Gradle 4.10 includes experimental support for an exciting new dependency management feature: source dependencies.

Source dependencies allow you to instead have Gradle automatically check out the source from Git and build binaries locally on your machine, rather than downloading them.

Please follow the instructions in the post to try out this new feature and provide feedback.

Android Gradle Plugin 3.2.0 released

A new version of Android SDK tools was released this month, bringing some new features and performance improvements:

• Support for building Android App Bundles
• Improved incremental build speeds when using annotation processors
• Migration tool for AndroidX
• New code shrinker, R8
• Bug fixes for Gradle build caching and compile avoidance

Check out the Android Gradle Plugin 3.2.0 release notes for more information.

Learning opportunities

• Sep 28: Measuring Developer Experience with Tableau and Gradle Enterprise
• Oct 4-5: KotlinConf 2018 — Watch sessions on Kotlin and Gradle Kotlin DSL v1.0 live
• Nov 12-16: Devoxx Belgium
• Nov 13-14: Introduction to Gradle
• Nov 19-20: .droidconSF 2018 — Use promo code “Gradle” to get $100 off
• Recording: Improving Android and Java Build Performance
• Recording: Optimize your CI Pipeline: Hands-on with The Gradle Build Tool Team
• Recording: Maximizing Developer Productivity with Gradle Enterprise

Gradle job opportunities

Gradle Inc. continues to grow and is opening more roles to fill. Will you help us shape the future of software automation?

• Gradle Enterprise back-end, and front-end engineering
• Gradle Build Tool Engineer
• Solutions Engineering — Field Engineer, Onboarding Engineer, and Solutions Consultant
• Operations and HR Coordinator

The details of these and other open positions available at gradle.com/careers.

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team