November 2023
Table of Contents
Welcome to the November 2023 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.
This edition covers recent content from the community, as well as announcements about Gradle Build Server from Microsoft and the new Declarative Gradle initiative from Gradle.
From the Community
Blog Posts
- “Too Many Open Files” - Debugging Leaking Files on the Gradle Daemon - A deep dive into debugging file leaks caused by Gradle plugins, and the free tooling available to make this easier
- Configuration Roles and the Blogging-industrial Complex - A closer look at the role-focused Configuration API released in Gradle 8.4 and why it’s worth learning if you’re authoring plugins
- Conservative Libraries with Liberal Tooling - Considerations for JVM library developers when selecting a language and development tooling version
- Accelerate your Android Development blog series:
- How to Tame Gradle Dependency Version Management - Version Catalogs can be used without TOML files, here’s an in-depth example of how and why
- Finding the Right Balance in Gradle Dependency Strategy - Explore different approaches to defining dependencies and managing plugin versions
- Common Gradle Misconceptions - Follow a software engineer’s self-discovery to a fuller understanding of Gradle, including the Gradle daemon, the configuration cache, and parallelizing tasks
Plugins
- Room Gradle Plugin 2.6.0 has been released. This release solves long standing caching issues when using the Room Annotation Processor with Android projects.
- Gradle TestKit Plugin is a new plugin that simplifies the usage of TestKit for testing plugins and build logic.
Gradle Build Server
Microsoft announced the Build Server for Gradle in the blog post, Elevating Java Development in Visual Studio Code: Experience the new Build Server for Gradle. Later, it announced open-sourcing the project and shared plans in the blog post, Announcing the Build Server for Gradle Open-Source Repository.
The Build Server Protocol (BSP) is an abstraction over build systems similar to the Language Server Protocol (LSP) for programming languages. Microsoft and Gradle collaborated on the Build Server for Gradle to improve the support for Gradle in Visual Studio Code.
With BSP, the support for Gradle in Visual Studio Code is more reliable and consistent. Compilation and code generation tasks are already delegated to Gradle in the upcoming Visual Studio Code version, so results will always be identical between IDE, command-line invocations, and Continuous Integration. The same is planned for other other tasks, including running tests.
From the Gradle Team
Declarative Gradle
In the Declarative Gradle blog post, we announce our new initiative and describe how we plan to realize our vision for an elegant and extensible declarative build language that allows developers to describe any kind of software clearly and understandably.
We are prototyping a restricted DSL that separates the software definition and build logic so that the build language is fully declarative. At the same time, we are working on improving the developer-facing part of the build definition to make it clearer, more familiar, and simpler for developers. We are also collaborating with Google and JetBrains to ensure an excellent IDE experience and that the solution works well for Android and Kotlin Multiplatform ecosystems.
We believe this project will improve the experience of using Gradle for both software developers and build engineers.
Upcoming Trainings and Events
- November 28, Online Webcast - DPE: The Next Big Thing in Software Development
- December 4-7, Industry Event - DevOpsCon Munich featuring a talk on DPE by Gradle’s Stefan Wolf
- December 4-6, Advocacy Event - DevOps Vision (NFJS)
- December 5, Industry Event - DevOpsWorld London (Financial Services)
- December 6-8, Industry Event - Tech Leader Summit (NFJS)
- December 11-14, Industry Event - ArchConf (NFJS)
- December 14, Online Training - Develocity for Developers
- December 21, Online Training - Managing Test Failures and Flakiness with Develocity
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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