December 2024

Welcome to the December 2024 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! In this edition, you can learn more about Configuration Cache improvements, experimental support for Declarative Gradle in IntelliJ IDEA, upcoming events, and surveys. This is our last newsletter this year so we wish a great new year to all Gradle users and community members.

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

New Videos

IntelliJ IDEA - Preview Support for Declarative Gradle

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.

Improved Configuration Cache performance

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!

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:

See the full conference archive on our site!

Develocity 2024.3 Now Available

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

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.

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!

Happy New Year from Gradle

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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