Started my software developement career in Java with Ant build tool. By the time I want to learn about Ant, my team has migrated to Maven in early 2011. Since then, Maven is only the build tool that have been using for all the applications.

Currently, Gradle and Maven are the two major build tools that many developers use during the software developement process. Some times it is very difficult to make a decision on which build tool to be used and why to use it? Most of the software developers are comforatble to use Maven, as it is standardised few years back or it might be already integrated with their existing applications.

But using a right build tool actually improves the devlopement and deployment time for a individual developers. In this article, I would like to discuss about Gradle and Maven build tools. At the end, we can conclude which build tool is a best fit for your application.

Gradle:

Gradle is a dependency management and a build automation tool used for different programming languages like Java, Android, C/C++. Gradle is based on a graph of task dependencies – in which tasks are the things that do the work.

Gradle led to smaller configuration files – compared to maven- with less clutter since the language was specifically designed to solve specific domain problems. Gradle’s configuration file is by convention called build.gradle.

Sample build.gradle file is below:

Maven:

Apache Maven is a dependency management and a build automation tool, primarily used for Java applications. Maven is based on a fixed and linear model of phases.

Maven prescribes strict project structure using configuration file called pom.xml, which also contains build and dependency management instructions. Maven’s build process is based on the available plugins in pom.xml. Maven supports wide range of plugins available in the market.

Here is the sample Spring-boot application maven pom.xml file

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
	<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
	<parent>
		<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
		<version>2.2.1.RELEASE</version>
		<relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
	</parent>
	<groupId>in.malliktalksjava</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-maven</artifactId>
	<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
	<name>spring-boot-maven</name>
<properties>
    <java.version>1.8</java.version>
</properties>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
        <scope>test</scope>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.junit.vintage</groupId>
                <artifactId>junit-vintage-engine</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Which build tool is best suitable?

Both Maven and Gradle have their respective strengths and weaknesses, here are some points considered on Maven Vs Gradle

• Flexibility: Both Gradle and Maven provide convention over configuration. However, Maven provides a very rigid model that makes customization tedious and sometimes impossible. While this can make it easier to understand any given Maven build, as long as you don’t have any special requirements, it also makes it unsuitable for many automation problems. Gradle, on the other hand, is built with an empowered and responsible user in mind.
• Performance: Improving build time is one of the most direct ways to ship faster. Both Gradle and Maven employ some form of parallel project building and parallel dependency resolution. The biggest differences are Gradle’s mechanisms for work avoidance and incrementality. Here is the Performance comparision results for Maven and Gradle: https://gradle.org/gradle-vs-maven-performance/
• User Experiance:  Maven also supports a wide variety of build life-cycle steps and integrates seamlessly with third-party tools such as CI servers, code coverage plugins, and artifact repository systems, among others. As far as plugins go, there is a growing number of available plugins now, and there are large vendors that have Gradle-compatible plugins. However, there are still more available plugins for Maven compared to the number available for Gradle. Gradle provides an interactive web-based UI for debugging and optimizing builds: build scans. These can also be hosted on-premise to allow an organization to collect build history and do trend analysis, compare builds for debugging, or optimize build times.
• Dependency Management: Both build systems provide built-in capability to resolve dependencies from configurable repositories. Both are able to cache dependencies locally and download them in parallel.

Conclusion:

By this time, you might have already decided which tool is best suite for your requirement. Known fact is that, maven holds the majority of build tool market today but Gradle will be definately a good adoption for complex codebases and newly applications.

Here is the video based explanation for the same article:

Helpful Articles:

https://gradle.org/maven-vs-gradle/

https://dzone.com/articles/gradle-vs-maven

https://gradle.org/gradle-vs-maven-performance/