April 2024
Welcome to the April 2024 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! Let’s discuss Gradle Build Tool 8.7 features, the recent Gradle Dependency Submission Action for GitHub, Develocity 2024.1, plugin updates, and upcoming events.
From the Community
Blog Posts
- Dockerize your Spring Boot Application with Gradle by Chakresh Tiwari
- Unveiling the Gradle Secret: Why Manual Cache Cleanup Isn’t Always Necessary by Ryan W. (behind a paywall)
- Gradle’s leaky abstractions: declarative(ish) shell, imperative Core: implementing a safe(ish) global configuration DSL by Tony Robalik
- Unearthing the Quirk: Dealing with File Access Issues that arise from Resource Optimization in Android Applications by Mobile.IT
- Unveiling the Reality: My Experiment with Non-Transitive R Classes and Compilation Avoidance in Android by Stefan M.
- Making Your Android Project Modular With Convention Plugins by Josh Eldridge
Videos, Slides, and Live Demos
- “Gratatouille: Metaprogramming to the Rescue of Your Build Logic” by Martin Bonnin (video, slides, repository)
- Recordings of J-Fall 2023 are live, including Gradle + Kotlin: Basics and Beyond by Lennart ten Wolde and Speeding up Jenkins, Gradle, and Maven with a Build Cache by Justin Reock
- “Modern Java App CI/CD Observability with OpenTelemetry and Gradle” by Oleg Nenashev at the Observability Day, Kubecon + CloudNativeCon EU 2024 (video, slides, demo repository)
And Books!
El (Bingquan) Zhang, a Google Developer Expert for Android, has published a new book: Extending Android Builds: Pragmatic Gradle and AGP Skills with Kotlin. As El wrote, “The book goes beyond Gradle configuration; it delves into the development of Gradle plugins that integrate with the Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) and other essential build tools, such as AAPT2, Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP), and Bytecode manipulators”. Check it out!
From the Gradle Team
Gradle Build Tool 8.7
We released Gradle Build Tool 8.7 at the end of March 2024. This release includes support for building Java 22 projects, better build authoring and troubleshooting capabilities, and configuration cache improvements.
For build engineers, the task development section of the Gradle documentation has been substantially updated in 8.7. The revised section highlights how to write lazy tasks and how to use lifecycle tasks properly. For build engineers and community plugin authors, the developing plugins section is brand new and details the difference between pre-compiled script plugins and binary plugins.
See the release notes for more details and the release video on our YouTube Channel. Thank you to the 50+ contributors for their work in this release!
We also started the new #releases-discussion channel on the Gradle Community Slack to facilitate discussions of the new releases. Join this channel to discuss the latest features!
Gradle Dependency Submission Action for GitHub
Gradle Inc. announced a technical partnership with GitHub on software supply chain security. As a first step, we released the new Dependency Submission GitHub Action for Gradle, which can be configured to automatically submit dependencies to GitHub’s dependency graph and receive Dependabot alerts for potentially vulnerable direct and transitive dependencies. Read more in the announcement blog post and official press release. We also published a short overview video here.
Develocity 2024.1
This month, the Gradle team released the 2024.1 edition of Develocity. This release focuses on test and build failure analytics. It provides new Build Scan insights into configuration caching for Gradle builds. Another big change is the addition of the Develocity Reporting and Visualization set of tools, which facilitates custom analysis of Develocity build data by allowing build data to be queried with an SQL-like language and visualized using the Grafana visualization platform.
Read the full features overview in the release announcement. You can also check out some of the new Develocity features on our public instances for open-source projects we support, e.g. Spring or Kotlin. For configuration caching analysis, every Gradle Build Tool user can access these new capabilities via Gradle Build Scan.
Declarative Gradle
Declarative Gradle keeps evolving. You can see more demos and documentation in this repository. Now you can see examples for more project types like Android applications or Kotlin Multi-Platform (KMP), and an anticipated release date for the preview is June. We also published a tentative roadmap for the project where you can see the key milestones.
Next month, we will do a full presentation at KotlinConf in Denmark. If you are going there, join Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene on May 24, 10:15, for the Developer-first Gradle Builds presentation!
Gradle Developer Huddles are Back!
We want to share more stories and facilitate discussions about Gradle developer experiences and new tools. On April 11, we hosted the first webinar in the new series, dedicated to the Gratatouille library by Martin Bonnin, to help developers write new Gradle Build Tool plugins by implementing Kotlin functions.
If you want to share your story or highlight a project you developed for Gradle, stay tuned for the CFP announcement or contact Oleg Nenashev on the Gradle Community Slack.
And April Fools…
On April 1, a few Gradle engineers collaborated on the Kradle 9.0 announcement, where they announced Gradle Build Tool renaming, switching to Kotlin by default, a new Krataouille plugin for writing plugins with Kotlin coroutines, and a full rewrite of Gradle Build Tool core plugins to Kotlin. That triggered discussions in the community, especially among those who didn’t see the date.
We would like to assure everyone that the April 1st announcement is not real, and there are no plans to rewrite Gradle Build Tool or to drop support for Groovy in the immediate future. If you are looking for the source of truth, check out our Public Roadmap and the stories linked from there. At the same time, you know, there is some truth to any joke. Stay tuned ;)
Community Plugin Highlights
- Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin v1.31.0 is now fully compliant with Isolated Projects (changelog)
- JVM Dependency Conflict Detection and Resolution Plugins from the GradleX Team released v2.0. This redesigned plugin combines the functionality of the Java Ecosystem Capabilities and Logging Capabilities plugins to ease dependency conflict detection and resolution in Java projects. It has many improvements, including the new jvmDependencyConflicts DSL that lets you express resolution strategies and metadata patching for Java projects
- New 2024.1.0 release of the Develocity API library for Kotlin. It supports the latest release of Develocity from earlier this week (and the library is renamed to Develocity too).
Upcoming Events
Check out Gradle’s upcoming community and hosted events! Say hi to us at our booth, and catch our speaking slots! Hope to see you at an event soon.
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April 23 - 25, Community Event - JAX 2024. Hear “Troubleshoot Your Gradle Builds with CI” by Oleg Nenashev. He will speak about the embedded capabilities of Gradle Build Tool, Gradle Build Scan, Gradle Doctor, and Develocity.
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May 8 - 10, Community Event - Devoxx UK. Hear from Trisha Gee on DPE, Java, Productivity, and how to troubleshoot your Maven and Gradle Scans. Louis Jacomet will also speak on Ephemeral CI and how to not let it kill your developer productivity.
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May 13 - 16, Community Event - JCon Europe 2024. Brian Demers will chat about test unpredictability, DPE, and Apache Maven, and Baruch Sadogursky will dive into DevOps for Java Developers.
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May 22 - 25, Community Event - KotlinConf. Sterling Greene and Paul Merlin will speak on “Developer-first Gradle Builds”
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May 29 - 31, Community Event - MakeIT 2024 / JCON OpenBlend Slovenia 2024. Oleg Nenashev will speak about modeling API services in Quarkus with Testcontainers, WireMock, and Gradle
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May 30 - 31, Community Event - Spring I/O Join Spring enthusiasts from around the world in Barcelona for this two-day, interactive conference
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June 3 - 5, Community Event - Community over Code EU Oleg Nenashev will speak about open-source mentorship programs and growing new teams and community leaders.
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June 6 - 7, Community Event - Droidcon San Francisco Catch Rooz Mohazzabi on a Mobile Developer Productivity Panel, hear from Inaki Villar and Nelson Osacky on “Artifact Transforms: The Other Folks of Our Android Builds”
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September 24 - 25, Hosted Event - DPE Summit Discover the only event dedicated to the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) and Developer Experience (DX)
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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