April 2025

Before we dive in—Are you interested in learning more about Declarative Gradle? Join Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene for a special webinar on April 24. They’ll explore common developer challenges in understanding and maintaining complex builds, and show how Declarative Gradle introduces a standardized, out-of-the-box approach to simplifying and streamlining build logic. RSVP Here.

From the Community

New Posts

• Options for Options - Ways to Pass Arguments to Gradle by Aurimas Liutikas
• Profile & Benchmark Android Builds. Build analyzing tools and different benchmark scenarios by Nika Chapidze
• Public (API) Declaration in Gradle plugins and libraries by Aurimas Liutikas
• Balancing Memory Heap and Performance in Gradle Builds by Iñaki Villar
• Optimize your Gradle, Maven, sbt, and Bazel builds with resource usage data by Brian Demers
• Treasure Cache - Gradle Cache Entries by Aurimas Liutikas
• How to Use Composite Builds in Gradle to Work Locally with Shared Modules by Jorge Luis Castro Medina

New Videos

• The Shanman Strikes Again: Gradle .kts Support in OpenRewrite with Shannon Pamperl
• Supercharging Gradle with Nx by Jason Jean at Toronto JUG
• Android Builds: Simple Recipes to Enhance Developer Productivity by Aida Issayeva at DPE Summit
• Gradle for Maven users by Jean-Michel Fayard at Paris JUG (in French)
• How to Send Java Gradle App Logs to Elastic Stack on DevOps Hint

From the Gradle Team

Gradle 8.14 Release

We expect the Gradle 8.14 release in a few days — now with Java 24 support! This release adds full compatibility with Java 24 and introduces support for GraalVM native image toolchains. It also brings enhancements to test reporting, making it easier to understand why tests were skipped. Lazy initialization of dependency configurations improves both configuration performance and memory usage. A new integrity check mode in the configuration cache also helps debug cache correctness issues more effectively.

On the build authoring side, the Problems API is expanded to support arbitrary structured data, making it easier for IDEs to consume rich diagnostics through the Tooling API, which was also extended to provide this data. See the release candidate changelog here. The final release should be live soon!

Declarative Gradle EAP 3

A few weeks ago, we announced the third Early Access Preview (EAP 3) of Declarative Gradle. This release introduces a new testing { } block, expands the Declarative Configuration Language (DCL) with support for List and File types, and brings improved IDE integration—including support in Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, and Visual Studio Code.

In EAP 3, Declarative Gradle remains experimental, but it’s ready for developers eager to explore it in simple Java, Kotlin JVM, and Android projects. While some limitations still exist, you can define your own software types or embed a DCL syntax block within Kotlin DSL build scripts. If you’re curious to try it out and share feedback, check out this blog post to get started.

If you’d like to learn more, join Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene for the “Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds” webinar on April 24, 8:00 AM PST / 17:00 CET. RSVP here.

New Gradle 101 Videos on YouTube

In addition to the full-fledged Gradle Build Tool tutorials on DPE University, we’re updating our training materials on YouTube. We’ve started a new Gradle Build Tool 101 & Tutorials playlist, and you can already find overviews for Gradle’s core features like Tasks, Build Caching, and Version Catalogs. Check it out!
To receive updates, make sure to subscribe to the channel!

Develocity 2025.1 Release

We’re excited to announce the release of Develocity 2025.1! We’ve packed this update with features to make your build and test processes even smoother. Here’s what’s new:

• Faster failure fixes: Instantly pinpoint Gradle/Maven build issues.
• AI-driven stability: Quickly identify and resolve build stability problems.
• Deeper test insights: Gain visibility into npm (Jest) and Python (pytest) test execution.
• Optimized build efficiency: Track and improve Predictive Test Selection and Test Distribution.

For a comprehensive look at everything new, check out the 2025.1 Release Notes.

DPE Summit - Call for Papers

DPE Summit is the premier event by Gradle dedicated to Developer Productivity Engineering and improving developer experience at scale. Last year’s DPE Summit featured speakers from Airbnb, Meta, Netflix, Google, and Uber. You can explore the full list of 2024 session videos and slides here.

This year’s event will take place in San Francisco on September 23-24. Tickets are already available, and we invite all Gradle users and developer productivity engineers to submit their talk ideas—the Call for Speakers is closing soon on April 27. We hope to see you there!

Upcoming Events

Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you and discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, or Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE).

• April 24, Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds (Online) - Webinar with Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene discussing the latest EAP 3 release and what Declarative Gradle brings to Gradle developer experience.
• May 15, Gradle Configuration Cache: 2x faster, 4x smaller, and ready for Gradle 9.0 (Online) - Webinar with Rodrigo Oliveira. They will talk about the recent updates in Configuration Cache and what the Configuration team plans for Gradle 9 and beyond.
• May 17, Swiss Open Education Day - Oleg Nenashev will present on mentorship programs in open source and academia, including stories from Gradle’s programs
• May 21-23, Kotlinconf - Meet the Gradle Build Tool team at the Gradle and Kotlin Foundation booths! Alex Semin and Rodrigo Oliveira will also present on Fast inner dev loops for Kotlin builds with Gradle.
• May 21-23, Spring I/O - Oleg Nenashev will deliver a workshop on integration testing with Gradle, Spring, Testcontainers, and WireMock.
• June 10, Paris JUG - Join Trisha Gee and Louis Jacomet for a presentation about Gradle Build Tool and Develocity.
• June 23-27, PlatformCon (Online) - Oleg Nenashev will deliver a workshop on modeling AWS service providers with Testcontainers, WireMock, and Localstack, in Java and Gradle projects
• August 3-10, JCrete - Oleg Nenashev will join this unconference, which will focus on the Java tooling ecosystem and developer productivity.
• September 23-24, DPE Summit by Gradle - Registration is now open! Grab your ticket and throw your hat in the ring to speak.

Webinar on Configuration Cache!

The Configuration Cache is one of Gradle’s most popular recent features and is set to become the preferred mode of execution in the upcoming Gradle 9.0 release. Whether you’re building Java, Kotlin, Android, or native projects, the Configuration Cache can significantly reduce configuration time—especially in large codebases. It also improves the overall developer experience, both in the IDE and when building from the command line.

In this talk, Rodrigo Oliveira will share the latest updates on the Configuration Cache, highlighting how it has evolved over the past year in terms of performance, resource efficiency, and developer experience.

You’ll learn about recent improvements—including new tooling support, integration with the Problems API, and deeper insights via Gradle Build Scan and Develocity—that make it easier than ever to adopt Configuration Cache and troubleshoot compatibility issues.

The session will include real-world metrics and examples from open-source projects that have already adopted Configuration Cache (including Gradle itself). Finally, Rodrigo will discuss what’s coming next, and how teams can prepare for Configuration Cache to be enabled by default in a future release. RSVP here

You can also join the community channels to learn more!

Spread the Word

We invite you to share news from this newsletter—Let’s help the authors and contributors! As always, this newsletter is also published in our Gradle Newsletter Archive, and you can share it as a link or subscribe via RSS.

Finally, the Call for Proposals for the May newsletter 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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