Introduction

Welcome to the July 2021 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.

This month was quieter than usual for most of our team in the Northern Hemisphere, so this issue covers mainly news from the community.

From the Community

Blog Posts

• 5 Reasons to Switch to the Gradle Kotlin DSL - lists good reasons for switching from Groovy to Kotlin DSL
• Tools of the Build Trade: The Making of a Tiny Kotlin App - describes how to build a Kotlin app with Gradle
• Optimizing Your Kotlin Build - shares tips for making Gradle builds faster and discusses common pitfalls specific to Kotlin
• 10 Gradle Best Practices to Supercharge Your Project - shares various tips for working with Gradle
• Gradle Task Inputs and Outputs - explains inputs and outputs of Gradle tasks
• Dockerizing Java Services with Gradle and Jib - demonstrates how to build and publish Docker images with the Jib Gradle plugin
• Gradle Version Catalog for Better Dependency Management - describes the version catalog feature preview
• Using ProGuard with the Android Gradle Plugin - introduces a new version of ProGuard Gradle plugin
• Running Instrumented Tests in a Gradle Task - shows how to use the experimental Unified Test Platform Android feature with Gradle

Podcasts

• #15 - Deep-clean with Sebastiano Poggi - discusses deep-clean script for completely deleting all caches for Gradle, IDEA, and Android Studio (we hope you won’t need it though)

Videos

• Gradle Kotlin vs. Groovy DSL (Side-by-side Comparison) - compares Groovy and Kotlin DSLs
• Set Task Group and Description (Gradle Best Practice Tip #17) - shows how to set group and description in custom tasks and explain why it’s important

Careers

If you share our passion for developer productivity and tooling, consider joining our globally distributed team and check out our job openings at gradle.com/careers. We are looking for software engineers, solution engineers and also a developer advocate and developer productivity engineer.