September 2024

From the Community

New Blogs and Videos

• Resource observability case study: jemalloc in Android builds by Iñaki Villar
• Java developers: Get what you want with observability and data by Trisha Gee
• What’s up? GradleUp! - announcing a new umbrella organization for community Gradle projects, by Martin Bonnin and the GradleUp team
• Metaspace in JVM Builds from the JVM Args for Builds series by Jason Pearson

New Releases

• The Kotlin 2.0.20 release is out! It introduces support for Gradle versions 8.6–8.8, has a new option for sharing JVM artifacts between Gradle projects as class files, and adds task dependency for rare cases when the compile task lacks an artifact. Learn more in the docs.
• Tony Robalik released Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin 2.0.0 with some breaking changes and extra behavior updates.
• The Faire team released a new Build Targets Plugin that integrates with Trunk and captures changed projects. It can be used to compute parallel queue targets, especially in large mono repos. This plugin is used internally by 500+ Faire developers.
• Develocity API Kotlin 2024.2.0 was released, supporting Develocity API 2024.2 and all the related Gradle Build Tool integrations.
• GradleX team published the new Reproducible Builds Gradle plugin. This plugin applies reproducibility settings to some of Gradle’s built-in tasks.
• detekt, a static analysis tool for Kotlin, got support for Isolated Projects in v1.23.7 - Release Notes.

Surveys

• JetBrains and the Kotlin Foundation are conducting the Kotlin Developer Survey. The survey aims to identify any issues or challenges you may have encountered with the Kotlin language, ecosystem, and tools, including the use of Kotlin DSL in Gradle. We invite build engineers and software developers to participate and share their feedback.
• The Gradle team is continuing the 2024 Software Developer Survey and inviting all users and community members to participate.

From the Gradle Team

Gradle Build Tool 8.10.1 Release

We released Gradle 8.10.1 on September 9. This is a patch release for Gradle 8.10 and fixes the following issues:

• #30239 Gradle 8.10 Significantly Slower Due to Dependency Resolution
• #30272 Broken equals() contract for LifecycleAwareProject
• #30385 Gradle should not validate isolated projects when the Isolated Projects feature is disabled

At the same time, we discovered more issues and plan to release 8.10.2 in a few days. We recommend users upgrade directly to 8.10.2 instead of 8.10.1. When you read this newsletter, most likely it is already available.

First updates: Gradle 2024 Developer Survey

We continue the Software Software Developer Survey to learn more about the key developer experience challenges and desired changes. Over the past month, we have received more than 400 substantial responses, and we would like to receive even more feedback, especially from software engineers and new users.

For example, here’s a summary of feedback on one question (“How difficult do you typically find it to add new dependencies or upgrade existing dependencies in your project?”), from 250 responders familiar with dependency management. Notably, the response distribution does not change much between the newcomers and advanced user cohorts. We plan to share the initial results and learnings in the coming months.

All software developers are invited to participate in the survey. Those who provide the most substantial feedback will get the special edition Gradle swag!

GSoC 2024 is Over!

This year we participated again in Google Summer of Code and had a few projects. Our highlight is the Gradle Build Server – support for Android projects by Tanish Ranjan. Apart from this main goal, Tanish also added support for Composite Builds and improved Java Home handling in Gradle Build Server. Last but not least, Tanish extended the Gradle plugin for Visual Studio Code and added the initial Android support there!

Android project with Gradle in Visual Studio Code:

To learn more, see the Project Page and the Android Support and Developer Documentation pages in the Gradle Build Server repo. Tanish also created all this documentation. Thanks a lot to him, and kudos to all the mentors and community members who shared feedback!

Hacktoberfest 2024, Get Ready!

Gradle will participate in Hacktoberfest 2024 this October! Visit our event page for all the details. We will kick off the celebration with a grand opening webinar the week of October 1st, featuring projects suitable for contributors of all experience levels. Some cool swag will also be available!

Learn more and sign up on our event page to receive news about Hacktoberfest, featured projects, and special Gradle team events. Join us this October!

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.

• September 24-25, Hosted Event - DPE Summit—Discover the only event dedicated to the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) and Developer Experience (DX). This event is sold out, but you can still live stream the keynotes by signing up here!
• September 30-October 1, Community Event - Open Source in Finance Forum - Meet with members of the Gradle team at this Linux Foundation event that brings experts together from across financial services, technology, and open source communities.
• October 7-10, Community Event - Community Over Code (Apachecon) - Meet the Gradle team at our booth and hear from Clay Johnson on Build Observability and from Clay and Brian Demers on Accelerating Maven Builds with a Build Cache.
• October 7-11, Community Event - Devoxx Belgium. Meet the Gradle Build Tool team there. Louis Jacomet and Alex Semin will also present on Gradle 9 and the upcoming features.
• October 8-11, Community Event - KCD Austria. Oleg Nenashev will speak on modern build tool observability with Gradle, OpenTelemetry, Develocity, and Quarkus.
• October 10, Online Webinar - Scala developers: Crack open the black box of sbt with build and test observability. Gradle is the #2 build tool of choice for Scala developers, after sbt, and now we are happy to announce new features like Build Scan and Build Cache for the Scala community.
• October 14-15, Community Event - BazelCon - Come see the Gradle Team and connect with other local Bazel enthusiasts.
• November 5-7 and 12-14, Community Event - API: WORLD in Santa Clara and Online. Laura Kassovic, Baruch Sadogursky, and Oleg Nenashev will speak about OpenAPI extensibility and developer productivity.

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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