January 2018

Welcome to the January Newsletter!

Happy new year from The Gradle Build Tool Team! In this issue, we’ll cover what’s new in Gradle 4.5, experimental new C++ plugins for Gradle, and some fresh new Gradle docs.

Gradle 4.5

Gradle 4.5 was released, and features:

• Faster up-to-date checks
• Memory usage optimizations
• Stable build cache support for C and C++
• Kotlin DSL v0.14
• Signing artifacts with gpg-agent

Here’s a 42-second video demonstrating what’s new in Gradle 4.5.

Experimental new C++ plugins

In addition to recent improvements to incremental compilation and build caching for C and C++, Gradle is proud to introduce 4 new experimental C++ plugins for building and testing native projects. From the introductory blog post:

The plugins will eventually replace the software model plugins and take advantage of many new features baked into Gradle core, such as a rich dependency management engine, build cache, composite builds, finer grained parallel execution, build scans, and more.

The post also shows samples for:

• Building C++ libraries with the cpp-library plugin
• Testing with Google Test and XCTest with the cpp-unit-test plugin
• XCode integration with the xcode plugin
• Running C++ applications with the cpp-application Plugin

Your feedback would be very helpful as we stabilize these new plugins. Please try the plugins out and file issues in the gradle-native repository.

Fresh new docs

You shared your thoughts on Gradle documentation, and now it’s time to show you some of the improvements based on your feedback.

• More examples and use-case oriented docs on dependency management, the Gradle wrapper, command-line interface, and other popular topics.
• Improved navigation showing where you are and linking to other areas of the documentation.
• Mobile-friendliness and faster page speed.
• “Edit this page” link that makes it easy to suggest changes.

There is still a ways to go. Please continue to file issues and let us know what would make Gradle easier to understand and use. A special “thank you” to those who’ve helped out by using the “Edit this page” links.

Community posts and projects

• Mastering Gradle caching and incremental builds — In this post, Fedor Korotkov explains how Gradle caching works and how you can make builds much faster using Gradle’s new build cache.
• Using Java 9 modularization to ship zero-dependency native apps — Steve Perkins shows an example native application built using Java 9 modules and jlink.
• Annotation processing with apt and Gradle in Eclipse — Part of an extensive tutorial for using Gradle with Eclipse, this section walks you through Gradle configuration for efficient use of the AutoValue annotation processor.
• Building Go projects made easy with Gradle — In this talk, Benjamin Muschko discusses how Gradle can streamline Go project builds.
• Gradle scripts for Kotlin lovers — A primer for adopting Gradle Kotlin DSL, providing guidelines, examples, and lessons learned.
• Gradle Initializr — A web-based Gradle project generator. Supports various project types, DSLs, and Gradle versions.

Have something you’d like to see featured here? Just send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Upcoming online training

• Feb 13-16: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM
• Mar 13-14: Introduction to Gradle
• Anytime: Maximizing Developer Productivity with Gradle Enterprise

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team

If you have some news you’d like us to share in the next issue, let us know using the #community-news channel on the Gradle Community Slack or by mentioning @Gradle on Twitter/X.

Until next time!
— The Gradle Team

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