DEVOPSdigest

Gradle announced an alliance with JetBrains to provide a Kotlin-based Build Programming Language for Gradle.

Why is this important? Historically, build automation has relied on simplistic shell scripts or inflexible XML files. This no longer works. In the age of Continuous Delivery and DevOps, builds have become a full-fledged engineering discipline. Today, a product’s build is mission-critical; it automates and assembles, connects, tests, packages and — in many cases — deploys or ships that product. As such, the design, implementation and maintainability of build code demands first-class treatment. Today, Gradle is taking the next step in elevating the discipline of build automation by supporting writing Gradle builds in Kotlin — a modern, pragmatic, and statically-typed language developed by JetBrains. The result for Gradle users will be best-in-class usability and performance, and deep IDE support in IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse — including refactoring, symbol navigation, code completion and content assist.

“JetBrains is widely respected for their excellent products.” said Hans Dockter, CEO and founder of Gradle Inc. “This alliance is based on mutual technical admiration and a common goal to place the most effective tools in the hands of developers.”

“The ultimate goal of Kotlin is to make developers’ lives easier, and we’re excited to partner with a great product like Gradle on this mission.” said Andrey Breslav, Kotlin team lead at JetBrains. “Together we’ll create a unique experience to the benefit of Gradle’s many users.”

Mobile, SaaS, IoT and Container technologies along with modern DevOps practices have transformed the requirements for modern build systems. With the DevOps and Continuous Delivery age producing more and more complex automation requirements on the build, there is an increased need to see build code as first-class, performance optimized software — an enterprise asset as opposed to a collection of scattered, convenience scripts.

“We are building the future of software delivery for all enterprises by working closely and at a large scale with some of the best software teams in the world.” said Adam Murdoch, CTO and co-founder of Gradle Inc. “We see these teams increasing their investment in scaling up their automation pipeline to improve their ability to deliver software.”

With organizations running tens of thousands of builds a day, having a fast, maintainable, extensible build is required to be successful. Since build code has become a first-class citizen in software, the need for a statically-typed, elegant, high-performing build language with deep IDE integration led Gradle to embrace Kotlin.