Gradle VS gradle-versions-plugin

A ("shared") build service is kind of like a singleton, in that when you register one in any project, it's available in all projects as a single instance. (This unfortunately turns out not to be true, in some cases, when using composite builds, but can be worked around.) An actual singleton (global static instance) doesn't work at all, for the record—try it if you want to lose some sanity. Anyway, use a build service whenever you need global mutable state in your build.

When using build tools like Maven or Gradle, you can configure environment variables in the build scripts or configuration files.

For large projects, purpose-made build tools such as Gradle and Maven are preferred for managing the directory structure since they introduce additional semantics for managing test code and other programming languages (among lots of other things). Most IDEs can integrate with these build tools easily. If you're just starting out though, I wouldn't worry too much about these, you can visit them later.

Project Build and Management: Apache Maven 3 (3.9.5), Gradle 8 (8.3)

No wonder this had been raised previously, https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/15383

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The details regarding the code compiling would vary from one project to another. For that project, it seems that it uses Gradle (a helper tool) for compiling. Check Gradle's documentation for more information.

At the moment, Java 20 is the latest version, but Java 17 is the latest LTS release. It's usually best to use an LTS release, because the latest releases won't be widely supported. And that's true of Gradle too. You're using Gradle 8.0, but not even the latest version of Gradle (8.2) fully supports Java 20. You'll have to wait for Gradle 8.3 to use Java 20.

This can tell you about new versions https://github.com/ben-manes/gradle-versions-plugin

In one of my larger projects I use https://github.com/ben-manes/gradle-versions-plugin to update dependencies every couple of weeks. I manually go through each available update, and now I have to check every androidx update to see if it's one of these special versions. On top of that, if it is, I have to go manually check if there was an update to the version that I'm on but beneath the special version.

In the meantime you can use the gradle-versions-plugin or one of its extensions. I wrote it a decade ago and naively hoped they would have offered something built-in and better by now. Maybe they finally will if the above moved forward.

https://github.com/ben-manes/gradle-versions-plugin is my go to plugin for updating and maintaining plugin versions (also allows you to update to stable only versions of dependencies once you setup some custom gradle methods.(note jitpack has bad meta data so you'll have to exclude this lib from that repo)

I like https://github.com/ben-manes/gradle-versions-plugin but there are others out there that are more up to date and provide more features. I only used it for dependency report generation. I'm going to play around with this and others more in the near future and see what one(s) I like.

Creating your own pre compiled script plugins for tidying up your build.gradle config and give an example showcasing config for the popular the popular versions gradle plugin