October 2024

From the Community #

New Blogs #

• Java on Visual Studio Code Update – August 2024 with the major updates in Gradle integration for Java, by Nick Zhu
• Kotlin JVM Args: Inheritance & Defaults (from the Gradle daemon) by Jason Pearson
• Telltale: Automating Experimentation in Gradle Builds by Iñaki Villar
• One-Click Dependencies Fix with Gradle and the Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin by Tony Robalik
• Our DPE Journey Halved Pre-Merge Build Time with an overview of build caching with GCP and GitHub Actions by Kengo TODA

New Videos #

• The Road to Gradle 9 by Louis Jacomet and Alex Semin - workshop at Devoxx Belgium
• Automating Gradle Upgrades with OpenRewrite Recipes at Code Remix Weekly
• Coffee + Software with Baruch Sadogursky on developer productivity, feedback cycles, Gradle, and Develocity

New Releases #

• Android Gradle Plugin received the 8.7 and 8.7.1 releases, which included several issue fixes and linting improvements. For more details, check out the full changelog and fixed issues.
• Magik (MAGIK - MAven repository on GitHub written In Kotlin) and buildSrc-catalog plugins by Giuseppe Barbieri are now part of the GradleUp organization.

From the Gradle Team #

Gradle 9 Roadmap Updates #

This month, we delivered updates to the Gradle 9.0 roadmap. Our focus remains on improving build comprehensibility and scalability. As outlined on our public roadmap, the key initiatives include: delivering clean and actionable reporting, promoting the Configuration Cache as the preferred way of execution, supporting Isolated Projects, and, of course, advancing Declarative Gradle. We also plan to update Kotlin to version 2 and increase the minimum required Java version to 17. You can find more details in the Road to Gradle 9 blog post by Louis Jacomet. The target release date for Gradle 9.0 is the first quarter of 2025.

To learn more about recent updates, see Louis Jacomet’s presentation at the Gradle 9 Webinar (September 19, 2024). For a more detailed overview, including demos, see the Devoxx Belgium presentation by Louis and Alex Semin (video).

Louis and Alex presenting Gradle 9 at Devoxx Belgium:

Gradle Build Tool 8.11 - Coming Soon #

Gradle Build Tool 8.11 is expected to be released in late October or early November. Build configuration will become faster thanks to opt-in parallel loading and storage of Configuration Cache entries. This release will also simplify 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-rc-1 Release Notes. Note that the contents of the release candidate might slightly change in the final release.

DPE Summit Livestream Recordings Now Available #

On September 24-25, Gradle Inc. hosted a major Developer Productivity Engineering event in San Francisco. The Gradle Build Tool engineering team had a booth where attendees could meet and connect with fellow Gradle users. Thanks to everyone who came over and shared their Gradle and developer productivity stories.

Meanwhile, the keynotes were live-streamed and are now available on Gradle’s YouTube channel:

• What Can You Discover If You Just Look? by Hans Dockter on observability into developer local and CI/CD environments (Gradle)
• Understanding and Measuring Developer Productivity by Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green (Google)
• Past, Present, and Future of Developer Productivity Research by Margaret-Anne Storey and Abi Noda (University of Victoria / DX)
• Unlocking Developer Productivity and Happiness by Kelly Hirano and Akshay Patel (Meta)

Gradle Build Tool Engineering Team at DPE Summit:

100 Million Submissions on Build Scan #

The Build Scan® service, a free service for analyzing builds, has hit 100 million build uploads from Gradle, Maven, and sbt projects! This includes all the gradle build --scan runs by thousands of Gradle users for both open-source and proprietary projects.

Build Scan provides analyses of build failures, build performance, dependencies, build cache, and test performance. Learn more in the Gradle User Manual.

Writing Tests is Hard, Fixing them is Harder #

Join Trisha Gee for the webinar on November 13 - Writing tests is hard. Fixing them is harder. In this webinar, Trisha will cover several techniques for troubleshooting tests and go through some of the information you need to identify problems. She will also rant about flaky tests, and how toxic they are to developer productivity. Then she’ll share some tips on writing tests to make troubleshooting and debugging easier. Including, of course, examples for Gradle Build Tool.

See the webinar page to learn more and register.

Featured Hacktoberfest Projects #

Since Hacktoberfest started on October 1, we’ve received dozens of new contributions from participants. The hot spots are the Gradle Community Site and the Gradle Build Tool documentation. There’s still more than a week left until the end of Hacktoberfest, so it’s not too late to participate.

Some of the featured projects include:

• 🎓 Beginner: Learn Gradle - Gradle Basics, Java, Kotlin, Android
• ✅ Easy: Adopt Gradle Best Practices in your projects with GitHub Actions - GitHub Actions, Scripting, Documentation
• 📖 Easy/Medium: Expand the Gradle Cookbook - Documentation, Markdown, tech of your choice
• 🌐 Easy/Medium: Improve the Gradle Community Site (this one!) - MkDocs, Web Design, Documentation
• 🐘 Medium: Contribute to GradleUp Plugins - Java, Kotlin, Android, Documentation
• 😎 Medium: Stabilize support for ViteJS - Kotlin, JavaScript ecosystem, Gradle
• 🛠️ Medium/Advanced: Configuration Cache Compatibility in Plugins - Java, Kotlin, Gradle

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.

• October 23-24, Community Event - Open Community Experience (OCX), fka EclipseCon. Meet Donat Csikos and Reinhold Degenfellner at the Gradle booth to talk about Gradle IDE experience and integrations and learn more about Build and CI Observability from Etienne Studer.
• October 31, Community Event - droidcon London. We have a Gradle booth there!
• 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.
• November 11, Webinar - Writing tests is hard. Fixing them is harder with Trisha Gee. Trisha will present on troubleshooting tests and designing them for easier troubleshooting, featuring examples from Gradle Build Tool.
• December 3-5, Community Event - APIDays Paris. Meet Oleg Nenashev at the OpenAPI track and the Open Specifications booth to learn how to leverage OpenAPI in Gradle projects.
• February 02-03 (2025), Community Event—FOSDEM 2025. The Gradle team will be there. We’ve also applied for a Gradle Build Tool developer table, fingers crossed!

As for learning Gradle in a self-paced mode outside the live events, check out the free Gradle Build Cache training courses on DPE University to learn more about incremental builds and how they work under the hood.

See you next month!

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