November 2024

Welcome to the November 2024 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! In this edition, you will learn about the Gradle Build Tool 8.11 release and subsequent patches, Declarative Gradle EAP 2 release, the results of Hacktoberfest and the Gradle Developer Survey, and future events.

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

New Videos

New Releases

From the Gradle Team

Gradle Build Tool 8.11 Release

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

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.

Declarative Gradle - gradle init demo

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

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:

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.

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!

DPE University Course

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.

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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