Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
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Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
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Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#2Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/89adwf/why_i_moved_ba...
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#3This pretty much matches my experience. I resisted maven and the obscure pom.xml structure for a long time but eventually came around due to its excellent dependency management. Now that I understand maven it's hard to see how Gradle really improves on maven for basic Java projects.
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#4I spent a good 18 years in the Java coding stack. I adopted Maven when they just released version 2 and watched one of its evangelists talk at a JavaOne. Obviously now it's insane to think about a programming language that doesn't have a dependency manager (even C/C++ has Conan!).
After a long time fighting between what I liked best between Maven or Gradle I realized that the only thing I really needed was the parts to build the Java code. Things like Docker, Java code generation and a variety of other tasks you often do for releases, I finally figured out what I needed to do:
Make sure everyone on the team can run Bash. From there I could stop worrying about Windows users - Git Bash or Babun or some flavor of Cygwin. And things are even better with Linux Subsystem for Windows.
Now we simply have bash scripts that do all our one-offs that often were nightmares to accomplish in Gradle or Maven. Whether it is JAXB or Docker integration every maven/gradle plugin I ever used was 10 times harder than just bash.
When you start taking out all the other stuff it started to become clear that Gradle was winning out. With gradle I can build my code and get a variable that represents every JAR I need for a deployment into a Dockerfile containing folder. So that's where I personally ended up liking Gradle more - because I stopped depending on Maven and Gradle to do the other kitchen sink tasks.
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#5> "Great Flexibility. Highly customizable build. You can easily create your own task and do whatever you want."
Usually this is a red flag for me. People's apps really aren't that different, if you're doing some weird customization its going to be a nightmare for the next guy to maintain.
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#6I spent a good 18 years in the Java coding stack. I adopted Maven when they just released version 2 and watched one of its evangelists talk at a JavaOne. Obviously now it's insane to think about a programming language that doesn't have a dependency manager (even C/C++ has Conan!). After a long time fighting between what I liked best between Maven or Gradle I realized that the only thing I really needed was the parts…
Honestly, I have the opposite opinion. I really don't like it when there are custom bash build scripts. And you have to figure out how they work and what they do. And how to pass additional parameters etc.
If you use Maven for your project, then I expect that if I run `mvn clean install` then it will build the project.
I think that is the whole point of standard build tools: that you can switch projects easily, run the same command and get the same result, and not waste time learning custom scripts for each project.
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#7> "Great Flexibility. Highly customizable build. You can easily create your own task and do whatever you want." Usually this is a red flag for me. People's apps really aren't that different, if you're doing some weird customization its going to be a nightmare for the next guy to maintain.
To me the beauty of Gradle is the complexity is hidden behind plugins so that the majority of builds are simple. I’d say a basic java build in gradle is simpler than the equivalent maven xml. The power is there for when you need it, but the basic plugins are easily configured for the basic stuff.
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#8This pretty much matches my experience. I resisted maven and the obscure pom.xml structure for a long time but eventually came around due to its excellent dependency management. Now that I understand maven it's hard to see how Gradle really improves on maven for basic Java projects.
Well, excellent... their versioning is so broken that it had to become a de-facto standard to become accepted
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#9This pretty much matches my experience. I resisted maven and the obscure pom.xml structure for a long time but eventually came around due to its excellent dependency management. Now that I understand maven it's hard to see how Gradle really improves on maven for basic Java projects.
Seems "obscure", but it has a schema.
Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
#10Yo, new Gradle developer experience lead here. I fully empathize that it's much too difficult to wrap one's head around Gradle, so I want to share some things you might find interesting:
* The Gradle Kotlin DSL, which is nearing production-readiness, substantially improves the assistance/docs one gets through the IDE.
* However, the Kotlin DSL does not help with the large API surface and understanding of Gradle concepts, so I have been working on improved docs and best practices for the past few months.
* However, most folks don't or won't read docs, so additional tools will help users opt-in to strictness and quality checks that enforce best practices through the tool.
Even with all that, one can think of build tools like languages: one tool will never be able to suit all needs or projects. However, I intend the broaden the audience for Gradle by making it more accessible to a wider audience.
I'd love your help. My Twitter DMs are open @eriwen. DM me the 1 specific thing you would change about Gradle if you could.
[EDIT]: Fixed the formatting of the bullet points.