Gradle, the open source build management and project automation tool, has reached version 1.4 with its latest release, which improves the application's performance and memory consumption. Gradle can now generate dependency resolution reports even when one of the dependencies cannot be resolved – something that was not possible before – and the report will contain details of the failed resolution, which will help users more quickly pinpoint problems with the build process.

New commands give users of Gradle more control over which stages of the build process generate reports, and a new format for TestNG reports is used by default. These new reports are generated as HTML versions for the user and as XML data that can be passed on to a continuous integration server. The new format is supposed to be easier to read and can be used with TestNG and Gradle parallel testing.

Performance improvements in Gradle 1.4 have been achieved by reducing the network queries when resolving Maven SNAPSHOT versions and when searching for local dependency artifacts. The --offline mode has been fixed and Scala and Groovy support were extended with automatic dependency configuration. More information about all of the features and improvements is available in the release notes.

Gradle 1.4 is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Binaries, as well as source code, can be downloaded from the Gradle web site.

(fab)