Why use Gradle instead of Ant or Maven

Question

What does another build tool targeted at Java really get me   If you use Gradle over another tool  why

User · Answer

This isn t my answer  but it definitely resonates with me   It s from ThoughtWorks  Technology Radar from October 2012      Two things have caused fatigue with XML-based build tools like Ant and   Maven  too many angry pointy braces and the coarseness of plug-in   architectures  While syntax issues can be dealt with through   generation  plug-in architectures severely limit the ability for build   tools to grow gracefully as projects become more complex  We have come   to feel that plug-ins are the wrong level of abstraction  and prefer   language-based tools like Gradle and Rake instead  because they offer   finer-grained abstractions and more flexibility long term

User · Answer

I don t use Gradle in anger myself  just a toy project so far   author means they have used Gradle on only a toy project so far  not that Gradle is a toy project - see comments   but I d say that the reasons one would consider using it would be because of the frustrations of Ant and Maven   In my experience Ant is often write-only  yes I know it is possible to write beautifully modular  elegant builds  but the fact is most people don t   For any non-trivial projects it becomes mind-bending  and takes great care to ensure that complex builds are truly portable  Its imperative nature can lead to replication of configuration between builds  though macros can help here    Maven takes the opposite approach and expects you to completely integrate with the Maven lifecycle  Experienced Ant users find this particularly jarring as Maven removes many of the freedoms you have in Ant  For example there s a Sonatype blog that enumerates many of the Maven criticisms and their responses   The Maven plugin mechanism allows for very powerful build configurations  and the inheritance model means you can define a small set of parent POMs encapsulating your build configurations for the whole enterprise and individual projects can inherit those configurations  leaving them lightweight  Maven configuration is very verbose  though Maven 3 promises to address this   and if you want to do anything that is  not the Maven way  you have to write a plugin or use the hacky Ant integration  Note I happen to like writing Maven plugins but appreciate that many will object to the effort involved   Gradle promises to hit the sweet spot between Ant and Maven  It uses Ivy s approach for dependency resolution  It allows for convention over configuration but also includes Ant tasks as first class citizens  It also wisely allows you to use existing Maven Ivy repositories   So if you ve hit and got stuck with any of the Ant Maven pain points  it is probably worth trying Gradle out  though in my opinion it remains to be seen if you wouldn t just be trading known problems for unknown ones  The proof of the pudding is in the eating though so I would reserve judgment until the product is a little more mature and others have ironed out any kinks  they call it bleeding edge for a reason   I ll still be using it in my toy projects though  It s always good to be aware of the options

User · Answer

We use Gradle and chose it over Maven and Ant  Ant gave us total flexibility  and Ivy gives better dependency management than Maven  but there isn t great support for multi-project builds  You end up doing a lot of coding to support multi-project builds  Also having some build-by-convention is nice and makes build scripts more concise  With Maven  it takes build by convention too far  and customizing your build process becomes a hack  Also  Maven promotes every project publishing an artifact  Sometimes you have a project split up into subprojects but you want all of the subprojects to be built and versioned together  Not really something Maven is designed for   With Gradle you can have the flexibility of Ant and build by convention of Maven  For example  it is trivial to extend the conventional build lifecycle with your own task  And you aren t forced to use a convention if you don t want to  Groovy is much nicer to code than XML  In Gradle  you can define dependencies between projects on the local file system without the need to publish artifacts for each to a repository  Finally  Gradle uses Ivy  so it has excellent dependency management  The only real downside for me thus far is the lack of mature Eclipse integration  but the options for Maven aren t really much better

User · Answer

Gradle nicely combines both Ant and Maven  taking the best from both frameworks  Flexibility from Ant and convention over configuration  dependency management and plugins from Maven   So if you want to have a standard java build  like in maven  but test task has to do some custom step it could look like below   build gradle   apply plugin  java  task test    doFirst      ant copy toDir  build test-classes   fileset dir  src test extra-resources         doLast                  On top of that it uses groovy syntax which gives much more expression power then ant maven s xml   It is a superset of Ant - you can use all Ant tasks in gradle with nicer  groovy-like syntax  ie   ant copy file  a txt   toDir  xyz     or  ant with    delete  x txt    mkdir  abc    copy file  a txt   toDir   abc

User · Answer

It s also much easier to manage native builds   Ant and Maven are effectively Java-only  Some plugins exist for Maven that try to handle some native projects  but they don t do an effective job   Ant tasks can be written that compile native projects  but they are too complex and awkward   We do Java with JNI and lots of other native bits   Gradle simplified our Ant mess considerably   When we started to introduce dependency management to the native projects it was messy   We got Maven to do it  but the equivalent Gradle code was a tiny fraction of what was needed in Maven  and people could read it and understand it without becoming Maven gurus

User · Answer

This may be a bit controversial  but Gradle doesn t hide the fact that it s a fully-fledged programming language     Ant   ant-contrib is essentially a turing complete programming language that no one really wants to program in     Maven tries to take the opposite approach of trying to be completely declarative and forcing you to write and compile a plugin if you need logic   It also imposes a project model that is completely inflexible   Gradle combines the best of all these tools      It follows convention-over-configuration  ala Maven  but only to the extent you want it It lets you write flexible custom tasks like in Ant It provides multi-module project support that is superior to both Ant and Maven  It has a DSL that makes the 80  things easy and the 20  things possible  unlike other build tools that make the 80  easy  10  possible and 10  effectively impossible     Gradle is the most configurable and flexible build tool I have yet to use   It requires some investment up front to learn the DSL and concepts like configurations but if you need a no-nonsense and completely configurable JVM build tool it s hard to beat

User · Answer

I agree partly with Ed Staub  Gradle definitely is more powerful compared to maven and provides more flexibility long term   After performing an evaluation to move from maven to gradle  we decided to stick to maven itself for two issues we encountered with gradle   speed is slower than maven  proxy was not working

User · Answer

Gradle can be used for many purposes - it s a much better Swiss army knife than Ant - but it s specifically focused on multi-project builds   First of all  Gradle is a dependency programming tool which also means it s a programming tool  With Gradle you can execute any random task in your setup and Gradle will make sure all declared dependecies are properly and timely executed  Your code can be spread across many directories in any kind of layout  tree  flat  scattered         Gradle has two distinct phases  evaluation and execution  Basically  during evaluation Gradle will look for and evaluate build scripts in the directories it is supposed to look  During execution Gradle will execute tasks which have been loaded during evaluation taking into account task inter-dependencies   On top of these dependency programming features Gradle adds project and JAR dependency features by intergration with Apache Ivy  As you know Ivy is a much more powerful and much less opinionated dependency management tool than say Maven   Gradle detects dependencies between projects and between projects and JARs  Gradle works with Maven repositories  download and upload  like the iBiblio one or your own repositories but also supports and other kind of repository infrastructure you might have   In multi-project builds Gradle is both adaptable and adapts to the build s structure and architecture  You don t have to adapt your structure or architecture to your build tool as would be required with Maven   Gradle tries very hard not to get in your way  an effort Maven almost never makes  Convention is good yet so is flexibility  Gradle gives you many more features than Maven does but most importantly in many cases Gradle will offer you a painless transition path away from Maven

User · Answer

Gradle put the fun back into building assembling software  I used ant to build software my entire career and I have always considered the actual  buildit  part of the dev work being a necessary evil  A few months back our company grew tired of not using a binary repo  aka checking in jars into the vcs  and I was given the task to investigate this  Started with ivy since it could be bolted on top of ant  didn t have much luck getting my built artifacts published like I wanted  I went for maven and hacked away with xml  worked splendid for some simple helper libs but I ran into serious problems trying to bundle applications ready for deploy  Hassled quite a while googling plugins and reading forums and wound up downloading trillions of support jars for various plugins which I had a hard time using  Finally I went for gradle  getting quite bitter at this point  and annoyed that  It shouldn t be THIS hard     But from day one my mood started to improve  I was getting somewhere  Took me like two hours to migrate my first ant module and the build file was basically nothing  Easily fitted one screen  The big  wow  was  build scripts in xml  how stupid is that  the fact that declaring one dependency takes ONE row is very appealing to me -  you can easily see all dependencies for a certain project on one page  From then on I been on a constant roll  for every problem I faced so far there is a simple and elegant solution  I think these are the reasons    groovy is very intuitive for java developers documentation is great to awesome the flexibility is endless   Now I spend my days trying to think up new features to add to our build process  How sick is that

[java] Why use Gradle instead of Ant or Maven?

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