Introduction

Welcome to the November 2022 Gradle Build Tool newsletter. This edition covers news from the community, some highly used plugins, and some semantic versioning insights. It also shares some blog posts from the Gradle Build Tool team, a What is Gradle Build Tool video, and a request to help us improve our documentation by completing the Gradle Documentation Survey 2022.

From the Community

Blog posts

• Gradle Goodness: Defining Plugin Versions Using Version Catalog — Provides a clear example of how to use a version catalog to manage plugin versions.
• Making Gradle Inputs Just Sensitive Enough — Describes why “absolute vs relative paths” matter for caching and how to change the settings to meet your needs.
• Create Webjar With Gradle and GitHub Packages — Shows how to create WebJars from scratch and publish the package to GitHub.
• Fixing Dependency Metadata in Gradle — Takes a deep dive into dependency metadata and learn why you might want to use component metadata rules.
• Gradle Composite Build Instead of Mono-Repository — Describes how to use composite builds for Android projects.

Videos

• Understanding Gradle #25 – Using Java to Configure Builds — Provides a guide to configuring Gradle with plain Java without Kotlin or Groovy DSL.
• Gradle Course for Beginners — Gets you started with a full 70-minute course on the Gradle Build Tool by tomgregory.com.

Plugins

• GradleX Build Parameters Plugin — Use Version 1.3 of this popular plugin for compile-safe access to parameters that adds some extra cachability and descriptions for groups.
• Android Root Coverage Plugin — Leverage this plugin to facilitate Jacoco configuration for Android projects by automatically setting up code coverage tasks for combined and per module coverage reports.

Other

A question arose around how various libraries use different styles of semantic versioning. The community come up with some solutions:

• Semantic Versioning in Java — Run this Kotlin script to turn diverse semver strings into sortable objects.
• Comparing Version Sorting on the JVM — Use this repository to get another take at a semver solution by adding some other implementations.

From Gradle Team

Blog posts

• How We Handle Flaky Tests in Gradle — Learn about a few strategies to address automated test flakiness challenges.
• Introducing Test Suites — Test Suites have been around for about a year, have you had a chance to explore them yet? Read this post to learn best practices for wrangling your project’s testing setup and hear a few hints at the future of testing with Gradle.

Videos

• What is the Gradle Build Tool? A Simplified Explanation — Get a non-technical explanation of why we need build software. How does code become an app? What is the Gradle Build Tool?

Documentation

• Gradle Documentation Survey 2022 — Help us improve our documentation by completing this 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, solutions engineers, application security engineers, and developer productivity engineers.