Uptake Vantiq dcompose & upgrade to gradle 8

[fhcarter]

Fixes #525

Upgrade to Gradle 8 (8.9). As part of this, fix a bunch of deprecation warnings, hopefully making some future upgrade to Gradle 9 easier. Also, upgraded a few dependencies to be less CVE ridden.

Most of the changes are things like

• buildDir--> layout.buildDirectory.get().asFile.absolutePath
  • quite the improvement. Not.
  • There's some oddball thing with one where we have to cast this to a string, so did it throughout. Don't know why the OR connector is different.
• various app config conventions want things nested
  • e.g., sourceCompatibility = 1.8 --> java { sourceCompatibility = 1.8 }
  • and similar stuff for the application { }

While there, changed some of the OPCUA tests to use a shorter connection timeout. We test against a number of online sample servers for validation, and, as these are primarily voluntary, they tend to come & go periodically. Changing this timeout shorted the test by 10-15 minutes.

[fhcarter]

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