Introduction

Welcome to the November Newsletter!

You have more than the holidays to be excited about: Gradle 5.0 is out!

To show off new features and answer your questions, we’re hosting a live webcast on Gradle 5.0 this Thursday. You can read what’s new in Gradle 5.0, including production-ready Kotlin DSL v1.0.

From the community

Blog Posts & Videos

• The Gradle POM - A blog post about the Kordamp plugins which provide Maven-like functionality for your Gradle builds by Andres Almiray.
• Rerun Incremental Tasks At Specific Intervals and Generate Javadoc In HTML5 - Two short blog posts about incremental tasks and generating javadocs by Mr Haki
• Using JUnit 5 with Gradle - An article about how to setup JUnit 5 tests with Gradle by baeldung.
• Integrate CLI tools with Gradle by example: Detekt - A blog post describing how to setup the Kotlin Static Analysis Tool Detekt from the command line by Björn Quentin.
• Gradle Tool Window in Android Studio - Short 2-minute video overview of the Gradle Tool window in Android Studio by Nate Ebel.
• What’s New With The Android Gradle Plugin - A Talk from Android Dev Summit 2018
• Gradle Plugins en Groovy: Escribir y publicar tus plugins de Gradle “made easy” (Spanish/Español) - A presentation by Jorge Aguilera at the Madrid Groovy User Group.
• Comment décomposer un projet Gradle en modules? (French/Français) - A talk from the Paris Android User Group by Martin Devillers.

New and Updated Plugins

• web3j Gradle Plugin - A plugin to connect JVM applications to Ethereum blockchains with web3j released v0.1.6.
• Antora Gradle Plugin - A new plugin to install Antora, a site generator capable of aggregating documentation across multiple GitHub repositories.
• Graal Plugin - A new plugin that integrates with GraalVM.
• Betablocker Plugin - A plugin to prevent the inclusion of dependencies following a specific configured pattern such as ‘alpha’ or ‘beta’.
• Google Play Services Plugins - Google open-sourced 3 plugins related to Play Services.
• Gradle Site Plugin - a plugin from Gradle showing best practices for plugin authoring has been updated to show Gradle 5.0 best practices

If you have a talk or blog post you’d like us to share in the next issue, use #gradle on Twitter or send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

🎉🎉 Gradle 5.0 🎉🎉

The Gradle Build Tool Team finally released 5.0! Please read and share the What’s New in Gradle 5.0 article which includes examples of many of the new features.

For users interested in using the new version, read the release notes and the upgrading from Gradle 4.X guide to see how version 5.0 may affect your build.

Kotlin DSL 1.0

With the Gradle 5.0 release, the Kotlin DSL is officially ready for widespread use. The biggest feature of the Kotlin DSL is the integration with IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3+.

You can get a preview in What’s New in Gradle 5.0 article and there will be a section of the What’s New in Gradle 5.0 Webinar devoted to demoing the Kotlin DSL.

If you are ready to try the new Kotlin DSL, see the newly updated Groovy to Kotlin DSL Migration Guide.

What’s New in Gradle 5.0 Webinar

This 1-hour live webcast demonstrates 4 key themes of Gradle 5.0:

• What Gradle’s Kotlin DSL does and who should adopt it
• How to take full advantage of incremental compilation and annotation processing
• Why unexpected dependency version X was selected and how to fix it
• What new task APIs are available in Gradle 5.0

Each topic is followed by a 5 minute pause for questions. And don’t worry, it will be recorded so you can watch it again later.

The live session will be November 29 at 10 am PT. To attend the live session or get the link to the recording afterwards, register here.

Devoxx Belgium Recap

Several members of The Gradle Build Tool Team attended Devoxx BE where Gradle had a booth. Thanks again to everyone who stopped by to chat with us about Gradle.

Cédric Champeau and Louis Jacomet gave a Deep Dive session on Switching to Gradle: maturity, performance, and pleasure!. This nearly 3-hour session shows the advantages of Gradle including: conventions and base plugins, incrementality (tasks, builds), advanced configuration, dependency management, and IDE integration.

Cédric also gave a conference talk about Improving Android Build Performance. Although the title is about Android performance, many of the tips and tricks are relevant to all Gradle users.

Video Resources

The following videos are available on the Gradle online training page:

• Improving Android and Java Build Performance
• Optimize your CI Pipeline: Hands-on with the Gradle Team
• Maximizing Developer Productivity with Gradle Enterprise

Job opportunities

Gradle Inc. continues to grow. Will you help us shape the future of software automation? We’re currently looking for:

• Gradle Enterprise – back-end and front-end software engineers
• Gradle Build Tool – Software Engineer

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

If you have some news you’d like us to share in the next issue, use #gradle on Twitter or send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team