May 2021

Welcome to the May 2021 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.

This issue covers news from the community, the latest releases of Gradle Build Tool, and updates on the JCenter shutdown and Gradle Fellowship program.

From the Community

Blog Posts

• Gradle 7.0 Released with Support for JDK 16 - summarizes new features in Gradle 7.0
• Gradle: Version Catalogs - describes the new central declaration of dependencies feature in Gradle 7.0

Videos

• What’s New in Android Gradle Plugin - discusses what’s new in Android Gradle Plugin 7.0 (from Google I/O)
• Top Gradle 7 Features & Improvements - discusses how to get the most out of Gradle 7

Plugins

• Shadow Plugin 7.0.0 adds support for Gradle 7

From Gradle Team

JCenter Shutdown Update

JCenter is now read-only, but JFrog has decided to keep JCenter as a read-only repository indefinitely. No new packages can be published to JCenter and all Bintray services have been shut down.

We still recommend that you reduce your dependency on JCenter as the latest versions of packages will be migrating to other repositories. See our blog post for more information.

Gradle Fellowship Program Update

Members of the Gradle Fellowship program are now included in the JetBrains Developer Recognition Program. See the blog post from JetBrains for details.

The Gradle Fellowship program also gained two new members, Hubert Klein Ikkink, also known as mrhaki, and Tony Robalik. They joined the group previously consisting of Björn Kautler, Schalk Cronjé, James Justinic, and Lance Semmens.

Gradle Releases

Gradle 6.9

It will take a while for everyone to upgrade to the latest major Gradle 7.0 release. In order to bring some of the improvements sooner to users that can’t upgrade to Gradle 7.0 yet, we released Gradle 6.9 backport release.

Gradle 6.9 backports limited support for Java 16, dynamic versions in the plugins block, and native support for Apple Silicon. See release notes for details.

Gradle 7.0.2

The latest Gradle 7.0.2 release fixes several regressions reported against Gradle 7.0 including an issue causing crashes in certain scenarios. As always, we recommend using the latest patch release. See the full list of fixed issues against Gradle 7.0.1 and Gradle 7.0.2 for details.

Other Releases

Android Studio 4.2

Android Studio 4.2 has been released. This release bundles JDK 11 instead of JDK 8, reduces Gradle sync time, adds the new Upgrade Assistant for Gradle, and uses Java 8 language level by default in the Android Gradle plugin. See Android Studio release notes and Android Gradle plugin release notes for details.

This is the final release to follow the old version numbering scheme. The next Android Studio release will be 2020.3.1 Arctic Fox and the Android Gradle Plugin will be 7.0.

Make sure to use the latest patch release Android Studio 4.2.1 that includes a number of fixes.

IntelliJ IDEA 2021.1.1

IntelliJ IDEA 2021.1.1 has been released. It fixes an important issue with the working directory configuration that affected many Gradle users in IDEA 2021.1. See the blog post for details.

Kotlin 1.5

Kotlin 1.5 has been released. See the blog post for details about this major release of Kotlin. Kotlin 1.5.10 has also been released.

Careers

If you share our passion for developer productivity and tooling, consider joining our globally distributed team and check out our job openings at gradle.com/careers.

Upcoming Events

• June 14 9:00 am - 10:30 pm (Pacific Time, US): Introduction to Developer Productivity Engineering
• June 30 9:00 am - 12:30 pm (Pacific Time, US): Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive

See the Gradle Training webpage for an up-to-date list of all upcoming educational and training events.

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If you have some news you’d like us to share in the next issue, use #gradle on Twitter or send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Until next time!

—The Gradle Team