Hi Owen, On Wed, 2023-12-06 at 14:01 +1100, Owen Thomas wrote: > I might use Maven in the future, and I'll hang on to my gradle build at the > moment (I'm getting incompatibility errors in my build but these don't seem > to have a material influence on what is being built), but I may yet turn back > to Ant.
definitely a good choice and I would be the last one trying to evangelise you. > > I think Gradle is making things too complicated for Java users. Bad. Although this is where is disagree strongly: One of the beauties of Gradle is its ability to include java code snippets as part of the build, which comes very handy whenever you exceed the standard features. I want to illustrate this with one example: Building native C libraries on varies architectures and bundle them into a Jar, where they are called by JNA depends on a certain convention on Names and Folders. In Gradle you script such a mapping logic easily in Java/Groovy. I would have no idea how to do that in Maven. One more thing I found very neat is dependency resolution with SNAPSHOT artifacts and "LATEST.RELEASE". One big contra is the Gradle's API "stability" though, I won't lie about that. At the end it all boils down to personal preference and taste (I for myself despise Maven) and the beauty is about having the choice. I think that 95% of the users won't even experience any major advantage of Maven over Gradle or Gradle over Maven, so just choose what you like most. ANT is dead as dodo for good, you may be better off with CMAKE if both Gradle and Maven are not for you. Cheers Andreas
