Introduction

Welcome to the August 2022 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.

Summer is coming to a close in the northern hemisphere. We finally have an escape from the painful heat and vacations are ending. It’s nice to get back to business as usual. This edition covers news from the community, new releases, and announces Configuration Cache Hackathon as well as the first annual Developer Productivity Engineering Summit.

From the Community

Blog posts

• Better Not Depend On Tasks - That’s the Old Timey Way — Shares how to replace the dependsOn instances in your code with lazy configuration.
• Caring for Your Dependency Garden: An Approach to Android Dependency Management — Offers useful dependency management tips and best practices in a four—part guide.
• 5 Gradle Things That Get Android Developers Confused — Provides a quick reminder of some Gradle Build Tool basics such as the definition of entities and building blocks.
• Android — Build Types & Product Flavors — Explains build types and flavors as applied to a simple build.gradle file.
• Migrating Jacoco Reports Gradle Tasks to Kotlin DSL — Gives a complete example of how one file moved from Groovy to Kotlin DSL and how the lessons learned apply to many migrations.
• Stop Wasting Time - Adopt Gradle Remote Build Cache — See an AndroidX approach to setting up a remote build cache.

Videos

• Understanding Gradle #19 – The Test Task — Explains how the Test Task works, how to configure it, and how parallel worker processes help.
• Understanding Gradle #20 – Test Fixtures — Explains how to share code between tests in different projects and builds.
• What’s Hot in Gradle 7.5 for Java Devs? — Provides an alternative way to understand what’s in Gradle Build Tool 7.5 for those that have not yet read the release notes.

Other

• My Feedback on Scripting: Bash Scripts vs. Gradle Custom Task vs. Kotlin Scripts — Shares thoughts on scripting by using Kotlin inside a custom task.

From the Gradle Build Tool Team

Configuration Cache Hackathon

The configuration cache significantly improves build performance by caching the result of the configuration phase and reusing this for subsequent builds. We are actively working on making it stable and our journey is documented on GitHub.

Want to get involved? We’re kicking off a Configuration Cache Hackathon starting September 1 at 9am PDT / 1pm BRT / 4pm GMT. Read more in our readme.

Gradle Build Tool 7.5 Release Presentation

Here is a video of the official Gradle Build Tool 7.5 Release Highlights.

From the Gradle Enterprise Team

Gradle Inc. Announces the First Annual Developer Productivity Engineering Summit

Register today for the Developer Productivity Engineering Summit 2022: Next Practices for Improving the Developer Experience. It will take place on November 2-3 in San Francisco. This two-day, two-track event will bring together the brightest minds in the world of developer productivity. Here’s your chance to learn from real-world use cases on how to leverage DPE next practices and tools to achieve digital transformation and pursue a developer-experience-driven competitive advantage. The event will feature speakers from Airbnb, DoorDash, Gradle, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, Slack, and Uber.

Use promo code “gbt-100” to get $100 off.

Gradle Enterprise Release 2022.3

Gradle Enterprise 2022.3 adds several new Build Scan™ features that make it easier to analyze and reason about build cache optimizations, along with a new deployment configuration option to utilize an S3-compatible store for Build Scan™ data that enables cheaper and faster large-scale deployments, and the option to utilize the same credentials and access control mechanisms for build cache access as is already used for Build Scan™ publishing and other build-time features, simplifying user management and build configuration.

See the release notes for details and additional enhancements.

Other Releases

IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2

IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2 is out, and now includes support for Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) 7.2.x. It’s a good time to test out remote development, useful for remote build cache or shared resources.

Careers

If you share our passion for developer productivity engineering and tooling, consider joining our globally distributed team and checking out our job openings at gradle.com/careers. We are looking for new teammates, including software engineers, backend engineers, customer support engineers, application security engineers, and a Wordpress full stack web developer to name just a few.