Upgrade from a very old gradle version

[mirkoperillo]

Upgrade to a newer Gradle version, upgraded:

• wrapper version settings,
• fix deprecated settings in build.gradle,
• Dockerfile

[iHiD]

@mirkoperillo Any chance you could benchmark this to see what it does to performance before we merge it pls?

[iHiD]

(Hopefully it's an improvement, but I've learnt not to trust my hopes for these!)

[mirkoperillo]

@iHiD I can try. I have to think a good way to test this.
I have proposed this upgrade to try to solve this sort of timeout here https://github.com/exercism/java-analyzer/pull/44/checks.

[mirkoperillo]

Some current data I can see immediately:

• Looking this https://github.com/exercism/java-analyzer/pull/45/checks the Test with Gradle step executes in 19s, for a total execution time for the entire task of 27s
• Looking a previous check https://github.com/exercism/java-analyzer/pull/40/checks the Test with Gradle step executes in 15s, for a total execution time for the entire task of 22s

[mirkoperillo]

Using --no-daemon option the execution time improves and is aligned to the previous one.
Test with Gradle ends in 15s and the complete task in 23s

[mirkoperillo]

@iHiD using the github action as benchmark the last commit permits to have the same execution time of the previous Gradle version.

Looking the usage of Gradle in this application I can say:

• it is used in Github action to build/validate the tests of application in a PR,
• it is used to build the application in the docker image building.

It is not used in the running container so I don't think this upgrade will influence the execution workflow ( I don't think we would have the same problems we had in java-test-runner).

Before merge it @exercism/java other opinions ?

[ericbalawejder]

Would it be valuable to upgrade the whole project gradle version?
https://github.com/exercism/java/blob/main/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties

Should we wait for gradle to support Java 17 before we upgrade both?

[mirkoperillo]

@ericbalawejder I think we can do an incremental upgrade of both, now to Gradle 7.2 and then to the version will support Java 17.

In this moment java-analyzer is based on Gradle 4.8 that is very old. The upgrade didn't introduce much work and the project currently is not used in production and it is under active development (so another step of active test before going live).

We know that exercism/java is already compatible with Gradle 7.x after exercism/java#1875, so we can think to align the wrapper to the new version (after a good session of tests)