Introduction

Welcome to the April 2022 Gradle Build Tool newsletter. This edition covers news from the community, Gradle Enterprise 2022.2 release, and the new releases of Kotlin and Intellij IDEA.

From the Community

Blog posts

• Caches Everywhere - a quick run down of the types of caches used by Gradle and related tooling
• Introducing Focus, a New Open Source Gradle Plugin - presents a new Gradle plugin from Dropbox that helps ease the pain of working with very large projects in Android Studio
• The Javax → Jakarta Mess, and a Gradle Solution - shows how to use capabilities and Gradle’s rich dependencies API to mitigate fallout from the Jakarta EE package rename
• Using the kotlin-dsl Gradle Plugin Forces Kotlin 1.4 Compatibility - the story of a migration to convention plugins in Kotlin, and how to use a newer version of Kotlin with the kotlin-dsl plugin
• Converting Gradle Convention Plugins to Binary Plugins - takes a buildSrc convention plugin and improves performance by publishing it with the gradle-maven-publish-plugin
• Using Gradle Build Scans in Android Projects - learn how to harness the power of Build ScansTM in a Gradle Android project, both locally and on Circle CI
• Setting up Azure DevOps Pipelines for Your Kotlin Projects - a quick look at running Gradle in Azure DevOps

Podcasts

• #31 - Dependency Analysis Android Gradle Plugin with Tony Robalik - The Developers’ Bakery - the author of the Dependency Analysis plugin discusses his plugin and shares his views on Gradle

Videos

• The Unknown Maven Repository System Powering Java - provides an overview of the history and usage of Maven repositories in the JVM ecosystem

From Gradle Team

Featured Event

• Happening in less than 24 hours! Tuesday April 26, 11:00 am PST (1 hour): Virtual Webcast - Introduction to Predictive Test Selection. Find out how to use machine learning to avoid running irrelevant tests to accelerate feedback cycles.

Gradle Releases

Gradle Enterprise 2022.2

Gradle Enterprise 2022.2 brings general availability of Predictive Test Selection for Gradle and Apache Maven™ builds, providing faster developer feedback by executing only the most relevant tests for a change. Maven users can also now benefit from Build Cache acceleration for non-clean builds. See release notes for details.

Wrapper Upgrade Gradle Plugin

​​The new Wrapper Upgrade Gradle Plugin lets you easily upgrade Gradle and Maven wrappers on Github projects. It takes care of checking the latest Gradle/Maven version, running the upgrade and creating a pull request if needed. Execute it periodically and you get Dependabot-like functionality for upgrading your wrappers.

JFR Polyfill 1.0.0

The Gradle Build Tool Team has released JFR Polyfill 1.0.0 - a no-op “polyfill” implementation of the jdk.jfr.* interfaces and classes for Java Flight Recorder (JFR) instrumentation. It allows safely adding JFR events to a codebase regardless of whether the runtime environment provides the jdk.jfr package, which some JDKs do not.

It was initially created for our internal Gradle Enterprise Test Distribution profiling and debugging. However, it is generally helpful for anyone wanting to provide fine-grained JFR telemetry where the deployment runtime may not support JFR.

Other Releases

Kotlin 1.6.20

Kotlin 1.6.20 has been released bringing previews of new language features as well as faster build times thanks to the experimental ​​parallel compilation. See the blog post for details.

IntelliJ IDEA 2022.1

​​The new release of Intellij IDEA provides the Dependency Analyzer for Gradle and Maven builds to facilitate dependency management and conflict resolution, vulnerable dependency detection (in the Ultimate edition), improved IDE performance for Kotlin, support for Groovy Postfix templates, and an updated progress bar for Gradle processes like downloading dependencies and importing artifacts. See release notes for details.

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 new teammates including software engineers, solutions engineers, a data scientist, an application security engineer, a developer advocate and a developer productivity engineer.