Introduction

Welcome to the February 2024 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! We are happy to announce the general availability of Gradle 8.6 and share more community news.

From the Community

Blog Posts

• Now In Android App builds with Gradle 8.5 and JDK 21 by Iñaki Villar
• Gradle Goodness: Using Maven Toolchains Configuration For Gradle Java Toolchain Resolution by Hubert Klein Ikkink
• Gradle Goodness: Java Toolchain Configuration Using User-Defined Java Locations by Hubert Klein Ikkink
• Finding the Right Balance in Gradle Dependency Strategy by Vadym Yaroshchuk
• Gradle Goodness: Continuous Testing For Java Projects by Hubert Klein Ikkink
• Gradle Tutorial for Android: Getting Started (Part 1, Part 2) by Ricardo Costeira from Kodeco

Videos and Live Demos

• Gradle Build Scan for Spring Boot projects by Baruch Sadogursky
• Gradle Build Server and its integration with VS Code by Rory Preddy and Sheng Chen from Microsoft

Plugins and Integrations

• Nix: Gradle installations can now be managed by the Home Manager. The new Gradle module can be used to install Gradle into the user environment and manage gradle.properties
• Play Framework: The Play Framework team announced beta testing of the new Gradle plugin for the Play Framework. This plugin is an aspiring replacement for the existing Play Framework plugin. Let’s see how it evolves!
• OpenRewrite / Moderne SaaS: New Gradle recipes were added tranks to the collaboration between Moderne and Gradle’s Develocity team, particularly for integrating Gradle Build Scans and Develocity in the project. See the full announcement here

From the Gradle Team

Gradle 8.6 Release

We have released Gradle 8.6. Key features on this release include custom encryption keys for the configuration cache, improvements to the build init task, improvements to build authoring, IDE integration improvements, and more helpful error and warning messages. There are also several important bug fixes. This release does not include breaking changes, so if you use Gradle 8.5, you can immediately update it.

Read more in the Gradle 8.6 Release Notes.

2023 New Lunar Year in Review

2023 was a great year for Gradle Build Tool, with many new features and initiatives being released. We published a blog with a recap of the key updates:

• Gradle 8 baseline with 7 feature-packed releases
• Kotlin DSL became the new default for Gradle
• Configuration Caching, Build Speed, and Scalability Improvements
• Our First Google Summer of Code and Major League Hacking Participation
• Gradle Enterprise renaming to Develocity, and Gradle Build Scan enhancements
• What’s next, Declarative Gradle and the road towards Gradle 9

Read more here. We thank all contributors and community members for their work, contributions, and feedback! And let’s see what 2024 brings!

The Road to Gradle 9

On February 06, Louis Jacomet, a senior lead software engineer and the support team leader at Gradle, spoke at Jfokus about the road to Gradle 9 and our focus on scalability and comprehensibility. Louis highlighted the following:

• Continued investment in configuration caching
• Upcoming isolated projects feature
• Higher-level modeling of software projects
• Separation of concerns for building users and authors

Many of those items are already on our public roadmap; you can find the information and links there. We will keep posting updates on the evolution of Gradle 9 in the following newsletters.

You can find the slides from Louis here. The video recording will be published later on the JFokus page and YouTube channel. We also plan to publish the text version on the Gradle blog soon. Stay tuned!

Gradle in Google Summer of Code 2024

The Gradle team plans to participate in Google Summer of Code 2024! We have submitted some project ideas to the Kotlin and Eclipse Foundations. Here are some of the project ideas we proposed so far:

• Kotlin DSL improvements for Declarative Gradle
• Gradle Build Server - support for Android projects (including Visual Studio Code)
• Make Buildship independent from the Eclipse Gradle plugin
• Improve Buildship project and classpath generation

If you want to work on one of these projects during Google Summer of Code, please join the #gsoc channel on the Gradle Community Slack! If you are a Gradle plugin or integration maintainer who wants to propose a project, join the channel!