6 ms·

Gradle has unfortunately gone the way of Maven in terms of becoming more and more of an unnecessarily complicated time sink.

levosmetalo 6y ago
Sorry, but maven is an order of magnitude better than gradle. In most cases it just works and is blazing fast compared with the alternatives.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  When Gradle advocates tell it is faster than Maven, they usually let it off that Maven doesn't require a backgroud daemon eating away GBs to be fast.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    Why is it a problem exactly?
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      > eating away GBs to be fast.
      - kaba0 6y ago
        Make something fast, cheap, stable; choose 2.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Gradle is none of those three.
bitcharmer 6y ago
I have the exact opposite experience. Been on tens if not 100+ Java projects over the last 20 years and 99% of developers I worked with moved away from Gradle after migrating to it from Maven. It's just harder to work with. Maven is super low-maintenance in comparison (and just works).
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
  And Maven makes writing custom build logic just hard enough to discourage people from doing so, which is a very good thing, from my experience of having worked with Gradle for 5 years or so.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    The irony about Gradle is that it is Ant all over again, and on top of that slow as a dog, unless oen allocates several GB for a background daemon.
    - oblio 6y ago
      At this point Ant + Ivy is probably better :-D
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Actually for anyone without XML allergy it definitly is. You get IDE completion, script debugging support, it is fast and best of all, it doesn't change in every release.
- this_user 6y ago
  Maybe that is the case if you are working on a project that is large enough to have a dedicated build engineer who stays on top of the Maven situation. But in my experience Maven has been an absolute nightmare to work with for me and others on the teams that I have been on. I don't know how many days have been lost to trying Maven to do one simple thing correctly. And I can tell you that more than once was I eventually so fed up that resorted to using the Ant plugin. That was usually able to solve a problem in five minutes that I had already spent a day on trying to get Maven to cooperate. That being said, when I switched over to Gradle almost ten years ago, it was still only a marginal improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. Unfortunately, things only seem to have gone downhill from there.
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
jhhh 6y ago
To support java 16 all I had to do was change the release tag in my compiler plugin and everything just worked. Didn't have to ugprade maven, didn't have to upgrade the compiler plugin. Gradle users had to wait until they released another entire major version with all the churn that entails.
- snafu109 6y ago
  Gradle has support for running and building with different JDK versions (it's not new with Gradle 7 but it's a recent feature). So it was possible to support building Java 16 projects while running Gradle on a supported Java version before Gradle 7 was released. https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/toolchains.html https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/toolchains.html
  - jhhh 6y ago
    Doesn't really seem like what you are saying is true: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/13481 https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/13481.
    - snafu109 6y ago
      I'm guessing you only read the issue or title on that link, because the second comment on that issue is from one of the Gradle maintainers suggesting using toolchains (which I linked to), with follow ups from various users advising some success, allowing them to target Java 16 while running Gradle on an earlier, supported version.
      - jhhh 6y ago
        The last comment by a gradle team member, before closing the ticket says "... you won't be able to run Gradle 6.8.x on Java 16". Some users having some success compiling isn't really a ringing endorsement of a build system when it's clearly not working completely.
        6y ago

levosmetalo 6y ago

Sorry, but maven is an order of magnitude better than gradle. In most cases it just works and is blazing fast compared with the alternatives.

pjmlp 6y ago
When Gradle advocates tell it is faster than Maven, they usually let it off that Maven doesn't require a backgroud daemon eating away GBs to be fast.
- kaba0 6y ago
  Why is it a problem exactly?
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    > eating away GBs to be fast.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      Make something fast, cheap, stable; choose 2.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Gradle is none of those three.

bitcharmer 6y ago

I have the exact opposite experience. Been on tens if not 100+ Java projects over the last 20 years and 99% of developers I worked with moved away from Gradle after migrating to it from Maven. It's just harder to work with. Maven is super low-maintenance in comparison (and just works).

isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
And Maven makes writing custom build logic just hard enough to discourage people from doing so, which is a very good thing, from my experience of having worked with Gradle for 5 years or so.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The irony about Gradle is that it is Ant all over again, and on top of that slow as a dog, unless oen allocates several GB for a background daemon.
  - oblio 6y ago
    At this point Ant + Ivy is probably better :-D
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Actually for anyone without XML allergy it definitly is. You get IDE completion, script debugging support, it is fast and best of all, it doesn't change in every release.
this_user 6y ago
Maybe that is the case if you are working on a project that is large enough to have a dedicated build engineer who stays on top of the Maven situation. But in my experience Maven has been an absolute nightmare to work with for me and others on the teams that I have been on. I don't know how many days have been lost to trying Maven to do one simple thing correctly. And I can tell you that more than once was I eventually so fed up that resorted to using the Ant plugin. That was usually able to solve a problem in five minutes that I had already spent a day on trying to get Maven to cooperate. That being said, when I switched over to Gradle almost ten years ago, it was still only a marginal improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. Unfortunately, things only seem to have gone downhill from there.
- bitcharmer 6y ago

jhhh 6y ago

To support java 16 all I had to do was change the release tag in my compiler plugin and everything just worked. Didn't have to ugprade maven, didn't have to upgrade the compiler plugin. Gradle users had to wait until they released another entire major version with all the churn that entails.

snafu109 6y ago
Gradle has support for running and building with different JDK versions (it's not new with Gradle 7 but it's a recent feature). So it was possible to support building Java 16 projects while running Gradle on a supported Java version before Gradle 7 was released. https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/toolchains.html https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/toolchains.html
- jhhh 6y ago
  Doesn't really seem like what you are saying is true: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/13481 https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/13481.
  - snafu109 6y ago
    I'm guessing you only read the issue or title on that link, because the second comment on that issue is from one of the Gradle maintainers suggesting using toolchains (which I linked to), with follow ups from various users advising some success, allowing them to target Java 16 while running Gradle on an earlier, supported version.
    - jhhh 6y ago
      The last comment by a gradle team member, before closing the ticket says "... you won't be able to run Gradle 6.8.x on Java 16". Some users having some success compiling isn't really a ringing endorsement of a build system when it's clearly not working completely.
      - 6y ago