Why Maven rather than Gradle? Gradle has all the libraries in Maven Central. Gradle also has an extensive set of useful plugins built in [1], and many more available externally [2]. In particular, there's a plugin for making a fat jar [3], and even without a plugin, it's a few lines of code [4]. Or you can also make something more exotic like a capsule [5] or a shell script [6], or my preferred format, a 'distribution zip' file containing loose jars and a shell script [7] - which you can even make executable, because i wanted to troll my boss one day [8]).
And there's no XML, it's pretty concise (Groovy syntax, convention over configuration, sensible defaults), and although its raw speed is no better than Maven's, it is smart enough to only execute tasks which are needed (rather than everything, every time, as Maven does), and can run as a daemon to avoid startup costs [9], so in practice it's far faster than Maven. Still downloads the internet now and then, though.
But extension is an absolute joy - there is simply no comparison to Maven. There's a very satisfying spectrum of ways to define your own tasks, from blocks of code right in the build script, to classes defined in the build script [10], to externally packaged plugins, all of which are easy to do and integrate fully with the existing machinery (task dependencies, handling files, inputs and outputs, and so on).
Then there's the stuff you might not even notice until you get off Maven. Gradle builds are graphs of tasks, not sequences of lifecycle phases, so it's trivial to add more tasks, rearrange, tasks, etc. Concrete example: Maven provides a single test task (surefire); if you want a second (say, for functional tests), you can use a plugin (failsafe); if you want a third (say, for external contract tests), you'll need to write a plugin. In Gradle, you'd just make another instance of the test task. It's a few lines of code.
Sorry if i sound like a fanboy or a shill, but Gradle, while far from perfect, is so much better than Maven in every way that it pains me to see a fellow human being suffering under the latter. Seriously, Maven is obsolete. Just use Gradle. Until something better comes along.
[1] https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/standard_plugins.h...
[2] https://plugins.gradle.org/
[3] https://github.com/johnrengelman/shadow
[4] at its simplest, something like:
jar {
dependsOn configurations.runtime
from {
configurations.runtime.collect { zipTree(it) }
}
}
[5]
https://github.com/danthegoodman/gradle-capsule-plugin[6] https://github.com/cinchapi/jarsh
[7] https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/application_plugin...
[8] https://github.com/pivotal/executable-dist-plugin
[9] https://gradle.org/why/high-performance-builds/
[10] https://github.com/tomwhoiscontrary/PanettoneSpike/blob/mast...