May 2017

Welcome to the Gradle newsletter! The big news this month is that Gradle 4.0 is now released! There have also been major performance improvements to the Android plugin. Read on for all the details.

Be sure to check out the session list for the upcoming Gradle Summit.

Gradle 4.0 is available!

• Gradle 4.0 is now available, featuring:

  • Production-ready build cache for Java and Groovy compilation and Java test tasks

  • Enhancements in logging and terminal displays

  • Parallel downloads for artifacts and metadata

  • Kotlin DSL 0.9 with auto-detection of Kotlin build scripts, default imports for the Gradle API, improved samples and docs, and a better IntellIJ experience

• We are thrilled that #Gradle is ranked in the Top 20 of all open source projects.

• Learn how Gradle 4.0 can be up to 100 times faster than Maven in our new performance comparison page.

The Gradle Android Plugin

• Android Plugin 3.0-alpha: Brings significant performance improvements to Gradle builds, through better parallelism, variant-aware dependency management, compilation avoidance, incremental dexing, built in support for Java 8, and more.

• Blazing Fast Android Builds: a blog post by Stefan Oehme about the first preview version of the Android Gradle 3.0 plugin. From the post, here is a graph of Android performance on a particularly large app with 130 subprojects:

• Speeding Up Your Android Builds presentation at Google I/O by James Lau (Product Manager, Google) and Jerome Dochez (Software Engineer, Google) gives recommendations for improving your Android builds and advice for configuring multi-module projects

Upcoming Events

• Gradle Summit, June 22 - 23, 2017

Upcoming Training Classes

• Gradle In-Depth Training, June 19 - 21, 2017 (prior to Gradle Summit)

• Introduction to Gradle (free!), July 11 - 12, 2017

• Advanced Gradle Fundamentals, August 8 - 11, 2017

Career Opportunity

• Gradle Consultant: Gradle, Inc. is looking for consultants with build automation experience and a strong engineering background. Help some of the top technology companies in the world succeed with Gradle.