Hello, Again
Welcome to the new Gradle blog. On behalf of the whole team, it’s my pleasure to write this first post and share a bit about what we’re up to.
Mainly, we’re putting together this new blog because we want to make sure users find out about the most important developments in Gradle-land. Our team has grown rapidly over the last couple years, and as a result we’ve shipped many new features and improvements. All too often, though, we find that would-be users never hear about them. This recent tweet provides a perfect example:
I read news, I try to keep up-to-date. So how did I miss that @gradle can build @playframework? Gotta look into this.
— Cristian Duicu (@cduicu) September 23, 2016
Cristian’s question is a fair one. We first shipped Play support over a year ago; we mentioned it in our Gradle 2.6 forum announcement and release notes, and we wrote a chapter about it in our user manual. Still, Cristian—and probably many others—missed it. How is that?
The answer is pretty straightforward. Forum announcements and release notes are useful documents, but they get buried as new releases pile up. Reference documentation is important too, but our user manual has grown large, meaning that Chapter 70: Building Play Applications is easy to miss if you’re not already looking for it.
This situation isn’t surprising, nor is it unique to Gradle. As any project grows, it becomes a challenge to communicate about it effectively. In any case, we can no longer expect every current and future Gradle user to dig through past release notes or to read our user manual cover to cover simply to discover what Gradle can do. It’s on us to find better ways to get the word out.
And that’s where this new blog comes in. We’ll post here whenever there’s something new in Gradle that we don’t want you to miss. We’ll keep it focused on things we think are important and worth your time. We hope it’ll become a trusted resource—not only for you to stay up to date with Gradle, but also for us to get feedback through your comments.
A better blog isn’t a silver bullet, but we think it’s a great place to start. Indeed, it’s just the first step in a much larger effort to make working with and learning about Gradle as easy and enjoyable as possible. In the weeks to come you’ll see further improvements, including new guides and tutorials, a new gradle.org website, and a simpler process for filing bugs and feature requests.
Naturally, we’ll announce each of these changes here on the blog. To stay tuned, subscribe to the blog’s Atom feed or follow @Gradle on Twitter, where we’ll link to new posts as we publish them.