Introduction

Welcome to the December 2023 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.

This edition covers recent content from the community, Gradle Build Tool 8.5 release, and the new releases of IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio.

From the Community

Videos

• The latest installments in the excellent “Understanding Gradle” series by @jjohannes, Working with Files and Task Actions, provide insightful overviews of these key concepts.

Plugins

• Java Module Dependencies and Extra Java Module Info plugins offer new convenience and analysis features to perform Java project modularization based on the Java Module System.
• The new Gradle Integration with LambdaTest provides the capability to run Espresso tests in the cloud in the LambdaTest platform.

From the Gradle Team

Gradle Build Tool 8.5

Gradle 8.5 brings support for running on Java 21 (in addition to toolchain support delivered in the previous release), faster first use with Kotlin DSL, more helpful error and warning messages, and various improvements to build init and dependency verification, as well as several new APIs for build and plugin authors.

See the release notes for details.

This is the final release of the Gradle Build Tool for 2023. Stay tuned for the 8.6 release early next year.

Cucumber Companion Plugin

Gradle’s new Cucumber Companion plugins for Gradle and Maven provide a way to run individual Cucumber feature files as tests, addressing a frequent request by Cucumber users.

Thanks to the Cucumber Companion plugin, Develocity users can now benefit from advanced test acceleration techniques like Predictive Test Selection and Test Distribution support for Cucumber.

Other Releases

IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3

IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3 brings a series of improvements to Gradle integration, especially around build performance. Firstly, Gradle projects open faster because the IDE no longer automatically downloads source JAR files for all dependencies. There’s also a new incubating option to enable parallel Gradle model fetching for faster sync in Gradle settings. Finally, under the hood, this release uses a new and more efficient way to run tests through Gradle that’s compatible with the configuration cache, which should result in more cache hits and less waiting when launching test runs.

See the blog post for more information about this release.

Android Studio Hedgehog

The latest stable release of Android Studio, called Hedgehog, brings various improvements to the build process, including a safer and easier way to specify the Java home path used by Gradle, built-in detection of antivirus software impact on build performance on Windows, and the ability of Gradle-managed devices to target Firebase Test Lab.

See the blog post for details.