Introduction

Welcome to the January 2023 Gradle Build Tool newsletter. We are so excited to welcome you to the New Year.

This edition covers a lot of news from the community, and releases of Kotlin 1.8 and Android Studio Electric Eel. Plus, Square’s celebrating the release of Android Studio Electric Eel, which showed a 60% average gain in sync performance.

From the Community

Blog posts

• Building JavaFX With Gradle — shares how to easily make front-ends with current Java tools
• How to Convert Android Gradle Groovy to KTS? — gets you started with how to change all your build scripts to Kotlin
• Mastering the Gradle Dependency Tree — helps users see their dependencies using multiple methods
• How to Automatically Handle Version Updates Using Gradle — offers some guidance on how to manage changing versions
• Creating Your First Custom Gradle Plugin: A Step-By-Step Guide — provides an example of how to write, test, and publish a plugin
• How to Add Version Catalog to Your Android App? — shows a simple example of using the TOML format and some tips
• 🤖 Understand Android BuildVariants in 5 Minutes — walks through the reasons for build variants and how to use them
• Gradle: Basics — shows a simple representation of some Gradle terminology
• How to Publish a Private Repository via GitHub Packages, GitHub Workflows, and Gradle — details all the steps needed to publish a private GitHub repository
• Applying a 3rd Party Gradle Plugin as a Composite Plugin — provides an example of using included builds with other plugins
• What Is the Gradle Scripts Folder in an Android Project?— discusses the difference between build.gradle files
• Step by Step Create a Hello World Page With Spring Boot in 10 Steps— shows how easy it is to get started with Spring Boot and Gradle

Videos

• Understanding Gradle #28 – Clean Compile Classpaths With the Dependency Analysis Plugin — shows how to use the Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin to best manage your classpath for maximum efficiency
• 13 Key Insights From Gradle Hello World! — provides a clear list of insights from even the most simple build
• How to Keep Your Gradle Kotlin Dependencies Up to Date — describes how to use a plugin to help with version linting while using Kotlin

From Gradle Team

Blog

• How Gradle Works (1) - Startup — walks you through the basics of starting Gradle, the daemon and wrapper.

Podcast

• A Bootiful Podcast: Field CTO and Chief Evangelist at Gradle Justin Reock — Josh Long talks with Justin on the latest Gradle trends and why Developer Productivity Engineering is being embraced

Video

• Gradle Enterprise 2022.4 Release Overview — Gradle Enterprise 2022.4 adds several new features and enhancements to make life easier for developers and productivity engineers. In addition to an expanded Enterprise API, an even more accurate machine learning model for Predictive Test Selection, and better debugging information, we’ve also released improved plugins for Jenkins and the Gradle Build Tool.

Mentorship

• Mentee Application — The Gradle Build Tool Mentorship applications are open and accepting applications for the second cohort. Read more about what this entails in this blog post or see who was accepted into cohort one last year.

Releases

Kotlin 1.8.0

Kotlin 1.8.0 contains some great features like exposing the Kotlin compiler options as Gradle lazy property and the ability to disable the Kotlin daemon fallback strategy.

Android Studio Electric Eel

In Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1) parts of Gradle sync now run in parallel by default. This can result in significant speedups, especially for very large projects. Many teams like Square are Celebrating the Release of Android Studio Electric Eel along with configuration cache can save massive amounts of time.

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, an application security engineer, and other roles, including a new position for a software engineer who wants to become a technical writer.