While you’ve been waiting, we’ve been working. Many of you have been using Gradle in production for some time, and you’ve worked with us as we’ve built it into the robust, enterprise-class build tool it is today. Others have been waiting for this moment. And we’ve got some very good news for you.
Gradle is going 1.0.
If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll want to have a look at the release notes, which describe the most important new features added by the recent 1.0 milestone releases. There have been a lot of them, so it pays to catch up on what’s been going on.
We are continuing to improve Gradle across the board, but in the coming months we will focus on a few exciting features in particular. To get an idea of what we’re planning for the future of Gradle, check out the Gradle roadmap. We’d appreciate your feedback: if you have an opinion on any item in roadmap you can click through to the related forum entry and leave us a comment.
Post 1.0 is a time of planning for us, and we are now in the process of reworking our roadmap for the coming releases. So check the roadmap again in a week or two to get the most up-to-date picture of where we are heading.
The Gradle Book
If you’re new to Gradle, you should check out the free HTML version of the first book in the O’Reilly Gradle series, brought to you for free by Gradleware. There’s also a great screencast about the wrapper—a really compelling Gradle feature—by Matthew McCullough.
Eclipse STS Plugin
Plenty of our users are also Eclipse users, and we’ve always wanted their experience inside the IDE to be the best it can be. The SpringSource STS team has contributed admirably to this goal. Check out their Recorded Webinar: Getting Started with STS Gradle Tooling, a resource they produced to share the great work they’ve done and to help Eclipse users with the Gradle plugin (a YouTube version will be available soon). The SpringSource STS team has been a faithful friend of Gradle for a long time, and our teams have enjoyed a very productive collaboration. Gradle IDE support wouldn’t be what it is today without them. In fact, our collaboration inspired the creation of the Gradle Tooling API, which provides the rich and robust mechanism and tools to integrate with Gradle.
Webinars
To help new and experienced users alike, we’ve also produced several new webinars:
Community
Gradle has always been a grassroots phenomenon, but that doesn’t stop us from working to help make the community the most effective place it can be. Here are a few resources we’d like to share with you.
The Gradle Forums are a place where you can ask quesitons of the experts, offer help to others, and browse questions already asked and answered by others. Whether you’re sending Gradle pull requests every week or are just learning the tool, the Forums are a place for you.
The Events Page is an important place to watch for upcoming Gradle screencasts, conference appearances, and classes. The Events Page covers events wherever they occur in the world, so keep an eye on this regardless of where you live. If you find out about a Gradle-related event that isn’t on this list, let us know!
Training
We’ve developed even more tools to help new teams learn Gradle and experienced teams sharpen their skills. There are two new online classes designed for beginning and advanced users to learn more about Gradle from the comfort of their home or office.
Gradle Fundamentals is a seven-hour online class that covers the beginning Groovy programming, the basics of the Gradle object model, simple Java builds, automated tests, and multiproject builds.
Extending Gradle is an seven-hour online class that covers plugin development, customized Gradle distributions, standardized initialization settings, and more.
And don’t forget our three-day onsite classes for the most thorough deep dive available, taught in person by our expert instructors who are available to answer your questions and guide you through an intensive, hands-on educational experience.
Support
Gradle will always be a free and open-source project, but we know we have some users who can benefit from Gradleware’s commercial consulting and support offerings. If you work in a company that wants priority support and rapid issue response, follow the link and see how Gradleware can help you.