Introduction

The key highlight of this edition is the second Early Access Preview of Declarative Gradle (EAP 2). This release introduces many new features to the declarative model and declarative language with improvements to IDE support. It is now much easier to try Declarative Gradle, and we would appreciate your feedback! See the details and demo recordings in this blog post!

From the Community

New Posts

• Gradle 8.11: Faster Configuration Cache and Improved Configuration Time by Iñaki Villar
• From Code to APK: The Complete Breakdown of Android Build Tasks by Aniket Indulkar
• Gradle dependencies order matters! by Hanna Harchuk
• Android Interview Questions: Everything you need to know about gradle.properties file in Android Projects by Dawinder Singh Gill
• The two best ways to secure your API keys in Android projects by Sagar Malhotra

New Videos

• Understanding Gradle with Gradle 101 by Duncan McGregor
• Solving Gradle Build Challenges with Gradle Plugins by Ihor Herasymenko at Toronto JUG
• Groovy to Kotlin - Migrating a Gradle Build by Duncan McGregor
• Beginner’s Guide to Android Project Structure - Manifest, Gradle & More With Full Walkthrough by Abhishek Gunnal
• OpenAPI Extensibility - The Good, The Bad and The YAMLy with stories and learnings from Gradle and Develocity, by Oleg Nenashev, Laura Kassovic, and Baruch Sadogursky

New Releases

• Declarative Gradle got a second Early Access Preview release. See the announcement blog post.
• Java Module Packaging plugin for Java Module (JPMS) development got the 1.0 release. It allows building ready-to-ship packages with Gradle, for different architectures/platforms and package managers.

From the Gradle Team

Gradle Build Tool 8.11 Release

8.11 is finally out! Builds using the Configuration Cache can become much faster with opt-in parallel loading and storing of cache entries. As one of the early adopters shared, they got a 50% configuration time decrease on a build with ~600 projects between Gradle 8.10.2 and 8.11 In this case, the total configuration time went down from 2m4s to 55s, and the cache size decreased from 700 MB to 400 MB. This is a great performance boost!

This release also simplified troubleshooting by displaying Java compilation errors at the end of the build output and by generating an HTML summary report covering select deprecations, warnings, and dependency problems.

You can find more information in the Gradle 8.11 Release Notes and the Release Video. Note that there were several reported regressions in this release, and by the time you’re reading this newsletter, most likely, there is an 8.11.1 patch release with regression fixes.

Declarative Gradle - EAP 2

In November 2024, we announced the second Early Access Preview (EAP 2) of Declarative Gradle. This release makes great progress towards being ready for public consumption.

This milestone includes a new official Android Gradle Plugin integration preview, support for configuring software types from build definitions in Kotlin DSL, new Declarative Configuration Language (DCL) features, a Language Server for Declarative Gradle, and initial support for Declarative Gradle in Visual Studio Code and Eclipse IDE. You can also now generate sample Declarative Gradle builds via the interactive “gradle init” assistant.

Get more information and see the demo recordings in our November 2024 Update. Learn more about the release, try out the samples, and share your feedback!

Gradle Developer Survey is Over

On November 06, we concluded the 2024 Software Developer Survey. Thanks to 500+ Gradle users who shared substantial feedback on Gradle developer experience, key pain points, and Gradle’s future evolution!

It will take us a few months to fully process the survey results, contact key respondents for interview opportunities, and distribute the swag. We appreciate your patience, and we hope to publish a full survey report in early 2025. For now, a new short feedback form is available for everyone to continue to share their thoughts.

Hacktoberfest 2024 Results

Hacktoberfest 2024 is over—kudos to everyone who participated in Gradle-related projects over the past month! We have yet to collect the full statistics (a lot of GitHub query magic), but we see around 500+ pull requests above average from Hacktoberfest participants to Gradle repos on GitHub. There were ~70 first-time contributors across the board. Those are great numbers!

It’s worth mentioning that a lot of those contributions are thanks to individual maintainers who made their projects visible and created good first issues for their plugins. Among the featured projects, the hottest areas were Gradle User Documentation, the Gradle Cookbook (changelog), and the community site (changelog), all in the documentation category. Some key deliverables by the Hacktoberfest contributors:

• Gradle User Manual got a major structure update, with many content improvements and new details/samples.
• Gradle Contributing Guidelines got a major update to support contributions to Gradle and its documentation.
• Gradle Community Site was extended with an events calendar and Gradle book listing and also received many smaller content, automation, and look-and-feel patches.
• Gradle Cookbook, an emerging community resource for Gradle tips and tricks, has a new section for writing plugins in Kotlin. Other sections also have more content. Contributions are welcome!

Upcoming Events

Check out Gradle’s upcoming community and hosted events. Say hi to us at our booth and catch our speaking slots! We hope to see you at an event soon.

• December 2-4, Community Event - DevOps Vision. Hear from Baruch Sadogursky on why “the production environment of our production environments” is the next productivity bottleneck and what we can do to solve it.
• December 3-5, Community Event - APIDays Paris. Meet Oleg Nenashev at the OpenAPI track and the Open Specifications booth to learn how to leverage OpenAPI in Gradle projects.
• February 2-3 (2025), Community Event - FOSDEM 2025. The Gradle team will be there. We will be at the Kotlin and Jenkins developer tables, and also in many Dev rooms and fringe events related to Gradle and developer productivity!
• February 3-5 (2025), Community Event - Jfokus. Trisha Gee will present on 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know, and also do a new edition of the “Are Your Tests Slowing You Down?” talk.

No travel plans this holiday season? Learn best practices for troubleshooting Gradle build performance in the free Gradle Build Scan course at DPE University. Black Friday or not, our training materials are always free!

Check out Declarative Gradle, and see you next month! Due to public holidays in many countries, we will ship the next edition earlier than usual. The Call for Proposals for the December edition is already open.