December 2024
Table of Contents
You can now also follow this newsletter by subscribing to it via RSS! RSS feeds are also available for the Gradle Build Tool blog as well as for other Gradle company resources (Company Blog and DPE Newsletter). Plus, be sure to follow our new @gradle.com Bluesky account!
From the Community
New Posts
- Gradle 8.11: Faster Configuration Cache and Improved Configuration Time by Iñaki Villar
- Popular Gradle Mistakes (and how to avoid them) by Radosław Panuszewski and Bartosz Gałek
- Distributed Build Service for Monorepos by the Doordash team
- State of Kotlin Scripting 2024 and [no] impact on Gradle build scripts by JetBrains
- Together in Isolation - Isolated Project Safe Way to Aggregate Optional Artifacts by Aurimas Liutikas
New Videos
- Strategies for Enhancing Performance of Large-Scale CI Builds by Michael Yoon
- The Ultimate Gradle Kotlin Beginner’s Crash Course For 2025 by Philipp Lackner
- Taming Dependencies with Gradle Version Catalogs by Duncan McGregor
- Gradle: The Build System that Loves to Hate You about Gradle footguns by Aurimas Liutikas
- Building Software Factories with GitLab and Gradle by Lee Faus
IntelliJ IDEA - Preview Support for Declarative Gradle
With the Declarative Gradle EAP 2 release extending support in Android Studio, the JetBrains team, in collaboration with Gradle Build Tool and Android Studio teams, has been hard at work bringing first-class support for Declarative Gradle to IntelliJ IDEA. This support is now ready for testing in a special IntelliJ IDEA EAP build.
JetBrains’ announcement blog post provides more information. If you’re a Java or Kotlin developer, we invite you to try out the integrations and share feedback with JetBrains and our team.
From the Gradle Team
Improved Configuration Cache performance
In Gradle 8.11, we significantly improved Configuration Cache performance by loading and storing cache entries in parallel (see release notes). Our benchmarks show a significant performance improvement. Parallel configuration provides further improvement in many scenarios.
In his recent blog post, Iñaki Villar shares performance metrics from a few sample Android projects, including the Now in Android App widely used for demos. For example, below there are build stats on clean agents (e.g. ephemeral CI) that request dependencies. Gradle 8.11 reduced the configuration time by 14.5% compared to 8.10. Enabling parallel configuration further reduced configuration time by 31.72%.
DPE Summit Recordings are Live!
We’ve published all the recordings from DPE Summit in September! Check out the session video archive on DPE.org—the portal for all our Developer Productivity Engineering events. At the conference, there were many presentations from Gradle Build Tool users who shared how they’re tackling developer productivity at scale. Here are just a few sessions that covered Gradle Build Tool:
- Android Builds: Simple Recipes to Enhance Developer Productivity by Aida Issayeva from Toast
- Boosting Developer Productivity Through Better Modularity by Jendrik Johannes, a Gradle Fellow from OnePiece.Software
- Reducing Build Times by 50%: A Story of Tools, Data, and Persistence by Ward Bonnefond and Douglas Crossley from Peloton
- Strategies for Enhancing Performance of Large-Scale CI Builds by Michael Yoon from Block
- Harnessing Data for DevProd Decisions: A Case Study by Louis Jacomet from Gradle
- Building Software Factories with GitLab and Gradle by Lee Faus from GitLab
See the full conference archive on our site!
Develocity 2024.3 Now Available
On December 12, we released Develocity 2024.3, the year’s last release. Develocity 2024.3 introduces several key enhancements to improve reporting, resource observability, and cross-platform integration.
Develocity Reporting and Visualization ships with new APIs and dashboards emphasizing test acceleration and dependency management. Develocity introduces Develocity Edge, a new beta capability that reduces latency and improves build performance by allowing users to deploy Develocity services closer to build agents and developer workstations. Develocity also introduces preliminary Build Scan functionality for npm and Python.
JavaScript & Python Ecosystem Survey
There are community plugins for Gradle Build Tool for Node.js and Python, but we are very excited to add Develocity support for native tooling in these ecosystems, starting with beta support for npm and Python in the Develocity 2024.3 release.
If you use Node.js or Python, we invite you to participate in the JavaScript & Python Ecosystem Survey to let us know what you think. This survey will guide our future investments in those tech stacks. If you have a similar use case, we would appreciate your feedback! For every survey response, $1 will be donated to a charity of your choice.
Upcoming Events
Meet the Gradle team and community members at the upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you and discuss anything related to the Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, or Developer Productivity Engineering.
- January 24 (2025): Community Event - SnowCamp. Kevin Davin will speak about the new GatewayAPI, a new way to expose your application deployed in a K8s cluster!
- January 27 (2025), Community Event - IET Summit. Oleg Nenashev will speak about API integration testing with Testcontainers, WireMock, and Gradle.
- February 2-3 (2025), Community Event - FOSDEM 2025. The Gradle team will be there. We will be at the Kotlin and Jenkins developer tables, and also in many Dev rooms and fringe events related to Gradle and developer productivity!
- February 3-5 (2025), Community Event - Jfokus. Trisha Gee will present “97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know” and the new edition of the “Are Your Tests Slowing You Down?” talk.
- February 7 (2025), Community Event - Touraine Tech. Kevin Davin will share his love of PostgreSQL and show you how amazing this database engine is!
Spread the Word
The Call for Proposals for the January edition is already open! We will also be doing a separate edition for the 2024 summary, and we invite you to share your highlights of the year in #community-news or in this GitHub issue.
And, of course, Happy New Year!
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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