Introduction

Welcome to the September 2021 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.

This issue covers news from the community and the new releases of Gradle Enterprise and Kotlin Gradle plugin.

From the Community

Blog Posts

• Gradle Plugins and Extensions: A Primer for the Bemused - explains how to create nested DSLs in Gradle plugins
• Using Type-safe Project Dependencies on Gradle - demonstrates using type-safe project accessors feature preview in Gradle 7
• A Bit of Gradle Housekeeping - shares a few tips on cleaning up Gradle scripts in Android apps
• Gradle: Debug Unit Tests - shares a tip on attaching a debugger to your build to debug unit tests

Videos

• New videos from the Understanding Gradle series about tasks, lifecycle tasks, configuring task inputs and outputs, implementing tasks and extensions, and declaring dependencies
• Use Groovy Consistently (Gradle Best Practice tip #18) - shares a few tips on keeping consistency in Groovy build scripts
• View the Gradle Task Graph (As a Tree) - demonstrates how to use gradle-taskinfo plugin to display the task dependencies as a tree
• Build Wars: Maven vs. Gradle in 2021 - briefly and lightheartedly discusses a history of build tools for JVM

Gradle Releases

Gradle Enterprise 2021.3

Gradle Enterprise 2021.3 helps you identify your slowest tests within and across builds, facilitating more effective investment in making your tests faster in order to reduce build time.

New operational capabilities such as support for horizontal scaling when deployed to Kubernetes and support for user-managed databases such as Amazon RDS allow installations to provide increased availability and performance, while also being easier to administer.

See release notes for details.

Other Releases

Kotlin 1.5.30

Kotlin 1.5.30 introduces a number of features improving the Kotlin Gradle plugin user experience including support for Java toolchains, and an easier way to explicitly specify Kotlin daemon JVM arguments. See release notes for details.

ApacheCon

Gradle was very proud to sponsor and support ApacheCon @home this year. The Apache Software Foundation has been running ApacheCon for over twenty years, and it never fails to inspire. It was refreshing to spend some virtual time with our fellow OSS community members and enthusiasts, and see how others are utilizing Gradle, Maven, and myriad other JVM-related technologies to build great free software.

We had a lot of fun hosting a booth contest in which participants could use our Maven Build Cache to speed up their clean Maven builds. Gradle swag was awarded to the participants with the most overall avoidance savings from cache. Watching familiar Apache projects like Ozone and CXF be built against our technology was really rewarding! While we look forward to our future in-person participation in ApacheCon, there’s no question that this year’s show was still a great experience for us.

Gradle 7 Survey

If you haven’t already provided your feedback, we would appreciate it if you could do that now. The survey will take less than 90 seconds to complete.

Why complete the survey? The Gradle Build Tool engineering team has released Gradle 7 and wants to learn more about the community’s upgrade plans, as well as to understand the reasons behind the decision to upgrade or not to upgrade at this time so we can prioritize development efforts and address upgrade impediments.

The plan is to follow-up with you with information intended to address your specific upgrade challenges and help you get the most value out of the Gradle Build Tool.

[Launch Survey]

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.