Wow, I'm surprised that people prefer Maven over Gradle.

I prefer Gradle for a few reasons:

- Way more concise. Gradle has a much cleaner syntax and doesn't require 
mountains of XML for everything. Each library dependency in a typical Maven 
pom often uses five lines of XML which is silly. Gradle and SBT have a much 
leaner syntax. I've converted Maven builds to Gradle and while still using 
plenty of comments and white space and not intentionally trying to write 
terse builds, the Gradle build is often an order of magnitude smaller. Like 
5-8 times smaller.

- Declarative when you want it, imperative logic when you need it. I've 
heard people say Maven forces you to be declarative, which is silly. Maven 
users frequently cram all kinds of file copying steps and other imperative 
logic into their XML Maven builds. Gradle is just designed to handle this 
use case well.

- Multi-project builds are handled better. Gradle's approach of allowing 
everything in two files at the root (build.gradle/settings.gradle) is 
better than having pom.xml files scattered throughout the tree. Intra-tree 
dependencies are handled better. Shared third party library dependencies 
are handled better.

Tooling? Maven is obviously more popular. IntelliJ has excellent Gradle 
support, but other IDEs may not.

On Sunday, September 28, 2014 9:33:31 PM UTC-5, Cédric Beust ♔ wrote:
>
> My feelings exactly. Every time a new build system comes out, I get 
> excited, I try it and I realize that while it does fix a few things that 
> don't work very well in Maven, Maven still wins overall in usability, 
> productivity, tooling and general support.
>
> And yes, I put gradle firmly in that category. I'm excited about Gradle 
> for a few things but overall, it's still not a very clear jump forward 
> compared to Maven (and I think Android's decision to standardize on Gradle 
> is a mistake that they will back pedal from in the next couple of years).
>
>
>
> -- 
> Cédric
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Mark Derricutt <[email protected] 
> <javascript:>> wrote:
>
>> On 25 Sep 2014, at 20:45, pwagland wrote:
>>
>>  Which is one of the reasons that I listen. I love the opinionated views 
>>> that are opined. And I strongly endorse any podcast that doesn't like Maven 
>>> ;-)
>>>
>>
>> Maven is a love/hate relationship - much like iTunes - it's not great, 
>> it's just that it's still better than everything else.
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
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