Introduction

Welcome to the June 2019 newsletter.

This issue covers the Gradle 5.5 RC1, Gradle Enterprise 2019.2 release, and various community news.

New Gradle content

• Blog Post: Monitoring build performance trends using Gradle Enterprise
• Blog Post: Automatic task execution in Buildship
• Video webcast: Getting Started with the Gradle Kotlin DSL
• Video webcast: Top Android Build Issues
• Video: Fast and reliable builds with Gradle and Maven (from JEE Conf)
• Video: Accelerating CI [at Gradle] (from GreachConf)

From the community

• start.spring.io - Generating a Kotlin application now uses the Gradle Kotlin DSL.
• Introduction into C++ Builds with Gradle - a tutorial from Benjamin Mahr about how to use Gradle in C++ projects.
• What is Gradle Build Scan? - a thorough blog post by Brad Cypert explaining how to setup Gradle build scans on a Gradle project.
• Bringing Android app build times down by 95% at Zomato - a blog post from Arnav Gupta about how they used build scans to reduce their build times.
• How to improve the build speed of your Android projects - another blog post about using Gradle build scans to improve Android build speed. This one is from Prateek Phoenix.
• Deploying Kafka Streams and KSQL with Gradle – Part 2: Managing KSQL Implementations - a blog post from Bryan Stewart outlining how to use a custom Gradle plugin for managing Confluent KSQL scripts.

If you have a talk, blog post, or plugin release 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 Enterprise 2019.2

The newest Gradle Enterprise release 2019.2 includes a new build performance trend dashboard, several new features for Maven users, significant improvements to caching for various popular Maven plugins, and the ability to run Gradle build scans for composite and continuous builds.

The blog post Monitoring build performance trends using Gradle Enterprise walks you through how to use the new dashboards to tell whether your builds are slowing down over time and how to pinpoint what might be contributing to the slowdown.

For Maven users, several features previously only available for Gradle builds were added in Gradle Enterprise 2019.2. This includes the performance dashboard and goal inputs comparison, an invaluable view for debugging cache misses. In addition, several maven plugins such as Javadoc, Checkstyle, and JAXB2 are now cacheable.

Gradle users can now take advantage of build scans for composite and continuous builds.

For more detailed information on the changes in this release, see the Gradle Enterprise 2019.2 release notes.

Gradle 5.5 RC1

Gradle 5.5 RC1 includes:

• the option to create Gradle plugins via Gradle init
• a way to define custom artifact transforms on dependency resolution
• the ability to set organization-level Gradle properties
• updated documentation (including guides) to use the new C++ plugins

To find out about the other new features and bug fixes included in Gradle 5.5 RC1, see the release notes.

Upcoming events

• June 6: CloudBees Days: Chicago
• June 10-13: O’Reilly Velocity SF
• June 11: CloudBees Days: Toronto
• June 12: CloudBees Days: Amsterdam
• June 17-19: JFrog Swamp Up
• June 20-21: Practical Dependency Management with Gradle 5 - Gradle Engineer Louis Jacomet will present at Voxxed Days Luxembourg.
• June 21-23: NFJS: Columbus
• June 27-29: NFJS: Dallas
• July 1-3: DroidCon Berlin - Gradle Engineer Volker Leck will present on Improving Android Build Performance and there will be a small booth. Stop by for t-shirts and stickers.
• July 2: Einführung in Gradle (Deutsch/German) - Gradle Engineer Benedikt Ritter will present at the JUG Bonn.
• July 10: Increase your Developer Productivity with Build Tools (Englisch/English) - Gradle Developer Advocate Jenn Strater will present at the Münster JUG.
• July 16-19: ÜberConf: Denver
• July 18: Einführung in Gradle (Deutsch/German) - Gradle Engineer Marc Philipp will present at the Mannheim JUG.
• July 23-24: Introduction to Gradle - official online Gradle training.
• July 26-28: NFJS: Austin

Job opportunities

Gradle employees are distributed all over the world so, in early May, we met at a rustic farmhouse outside Barcelona for our yearly World Meeting. If you want to join next year’s world meeting, apply today for one of the open positions listed below.

• Gradle Enterprise (remote/USA) – Solutions Engineer
• Gradle Enterprise (remote/worldwide) – Back-end and Front-end Software Engineers
• Gradle Build Tool (remote/worldwide) – Software Engineer
• Back Office (Berlin) – Part-time Team Assistant

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