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We are currently using ANT as our build tool and we are proposing our developers to use Maven as their build tool.
Our developers are resisting this change and asking us to give the benefit we will achieve by migrating to Maven. From the blogs what I read Maven can help in reducing build time when compared with ANT.
Can you please give us any reasoning how MAVEN Build script can reduce the build time when compared to ANT? Is this statement true in the first place?
NOTE: Ours is a legacy application that is developed in Core Java.
Are there any other powerful features in Maven which might pique interest of developers that can help us get their confidence in migration to Maven?
Transitive dependency resolution, standardised builds, lots of plugins, works with Maven repositories which are the de facto standard for storing Java artifacts.
maven can be faster than ant, if you know how to
structure your code into modules
use parallel build of (multiple) modules (a feature ANT really don't has)
use semi-incremental build (use newest compiler-plugin) - build only modules, which have changed files or which depend on other changed modules
other benefits are
maven can help you, to describe your build in a more standardised and structured way
standard project layout (folder src/main/java src/test/java ...)
clear build-process with a strict path of executed steps
clear definition of used dependencies
thirdparty dependencies
in-project dependencies
many helpers for a clear CI/CD setup like
plugins supporting gitflow
plugins supporting special release processes
plugins supporting integration-testing
As I am new to learn either maven or Gradle build tools. Therefore I wonder which one I select to study between maven and Gradle and which one has more requirement and demand in the industry. I want to use these build tools for Spring and Hibernate based projects. Any suggestion would be very helpful.
Thanks
Before this is closed for "not being a good question", I'll get some comments in.
You might want to learn the same thing that most other developers want to learn. Look at the third slide of the following slideware, which shows the results of Zeroturnaround's yearly developer survey. For this set of >2k developers, when asked what technologies they were interested in learning, Gradle was at the top of the list.
You can use either Maven or Gradle to build projects using Spring or Hibernate, but it's useful to point out that both the Spring and Hibernate code bases (not necessarily the applications using them) use Gradle to build their deliverables.
Maven provided the best build solution for quite a few years, but it's difficult to customize a build, and most Maven build scripts are very "noisy". Gradle solves those problems, while providing a smooth migration path from Maven or even Ant.
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What does another build tool targeted at Java really get me?
If you use Gradle over another tool, why?
I don't use Gradle in anger myself (just a toy project so far) [author means they have used Gradle on only a toy project so far, not that Gradle is a toy project - see comments], but I'd say that the reasons one would consider using it would be because of the frustrations of Ant and Maven.
In my experience Ant is often write-only (yes I know it is possible to write beautifully modular, elegant builds, but the fact is most people don't). For any non-trivial projects it becomes mind-bending, and takes great care to ensure that complex builds are truly portable. Its imperative nature can lead to replication of configuration between builds (though macros can help here).
Maven takes the opposite approach and expects you to completely integrate with the Maven lifecycle. Experienced Ant users find this particularly jarring as Maven removes many of the freedoms you have in Ant. For example there's a Sonatype blog that enumerates many of the Maven criticisms and their responses.
The Maven plugin mechanism allows for very powerful build configurations, and the inheritance model means you can define a small set of parent POMs encapsulating your build configurations for the whole enterprise and individual projects can inherit those configurations, leaving them lightweight. Maven configuration is very verbose (though Maven 3 promises to address this), and if you want to do anything that is "not the Maven way" you have to write a plugin or use the hacky Ant integration. Note I happen to like writing Maven plugins but appreciate that many will object to the effort involved.
Gradle promises to hit the sweet spot between Ant and Maven. It uses Ivy's approach for dependency resolution. It allows for convention over configuration but also includes Ant tasks as first class citizens. It also wisely allows you to use existing Maven/Ivy repositories.
So if you've hit and got stuck with any of the Ant/Maven pain points, it is probably worth trying Gradle out, though in my opinion it remains to be seen if you wouldn't just be trading known problems for unknown ones. The proof of the pudding is in the eating though so I would reserve judgment until the product is a little more mature and others have ironed out any kinks (they call it bleeding edge for a reason). I'll still be using it in my toy projects though, It's always good to be aware of the options.
Gradle can be used for many purposes - it's a much better Swiss army knife than Ant - but it's specifically focused on multi-project builds.
First of all, Gradle is a dependency programming tool which also means it's a programming tool. With Gradle you can execute any random task in your setup and Gradle will make sure all declared dependecies are properly and timely executed. Your code can be spread across many directories in any kind of layout (tree, flat, scattered, ...).
Gradle has two distinct phases: evaluation and execution. Basically, during evaluation Gradle will look for and evaluate build scripts in the directories it is supposed to look. During execution Gradle will execute tasks which have been loaded during evaluation taking into account task inter-dependencies.
On top of these dependency programming features Gradle adds project and JAR dependency features by intergration with Apache Ivy. As you know Ivy is a much more powerful and much less opinionated dependency management tool than say Maven.
Gradle detects dependencies between projects and between projects and JARs. Gradle works with Maven repositories (download and upload) like the iBiblio one or your own repositories but also supports and other kind of repository infrastructure you might have.
In multi-project builds Gradle is both adaptable and adapts to the build's structure and architecture. You don't have to adapt your structure or architecture to your build tool as would be required with Maven.
Gradle tries very hard not to get in your way, an effort Maven almost never makes. Convention is good yet so is flexibility. Gradle gives you many more features than Maven does but most importantly in many cases Gradle will offer you a painless transition path away from Maven.
This may be a bit controversial, but Gradle doesn't hide the fact that it's a fully-fledged programming language.
Ant + ant-contrib is essentially a turing complete programming language that no one really wants to program in.
Maven tries to take the opposite approach of trying to be completely declarative and forcing you to write and compile a plugin if you need logic. It also imposes a project model that is completely inflexible. Gradle combines the best of all these tools:
It follows convention-over-configuration (ala Maven) but only to the extent you want it
It lets you write flexible custom tasks like in Ant
It provides multi-module project support that is superior to both Ant and Maven
It has a DSL that makes the 80% things easy and the 20% things possible (unlike other build tools that make the 80% easy, 10% possible and 10% effectively impossible).
Gradle is the most configurable and flexible build tool I have yet to use. It requires some investment up front to learn the DSL and concepts like configurations but if you need a no-nonsense and completely configurable JVM build tool it's hard to beat.
Gradle nicely combines both Ant and Maven, taking the best from both frameworks. Flexibility from Ant and convention over configuration, dependency management and plugins from Maven.
So if you want to have a standard java build, like in maven, but test task has to do some custom step it could look like below.
build.gradle:
apply plugin:'java'
task test{
doFirst{
ant.copy(toDir:'build/test-classes'){fileset dir:'src/test/extra-resources'}
}
doLast{
...
}
}
On top of that it uses groovy syntax which gives much more expression power then ant/maven's xml.
It is a superset of Ant - you can use all Ant tasks in gradle with nicer, groovy-like syntax, ie.
ant.copy(file:'a.txt', toDir:"xyz")
or
ant.with{
delete "x.txt"
mkdir "abc"
copy file:"a.txt", toDir: "abc"
}
We use Gradle and chose it over Maven and Ant. Ant gave us total flexibility, and Ivy gives better dependency management than Maven, but there isn't great support for multi-project builds. You end up doing a lot of coding to support multi-project builds. Also having some build-by-convention is nice and makes build scripts more concise. With Maven, it takes build by convention too far, and customizing your build process becomes a hack. Also, Maven promotes every project publishing an artifact. Sometimes you have a project split up into subprojects but you want all of the subprojects to be built and versioned together. Not really something Maven is designed for.
With Gradle you can have the flexibility of Ant and build by convention of Maven. For example, it is trivial to extend the conventional build lifecycle with your own task. And you aren't forced to use a convention if you don't want to. Groovy is much nicer to code than XML. In Gradle, you can define dependencies between projects on the local file system without the need to publish artifacts for each to a repository. Finally, Gradle uses Ivy, so it has excellent dependency management. The only real downside for me thus far is the lack of mature Eclipse integration, but the options for Maven aren't really much better.
This isn't my answer, but it definitely resonates with me. It's from ThoughtWorks' Technology Radar from October 2012:
Two things have caused fatigue with XML-based build tools like Ant and
Maven: too many angry pointy braces and the coarseness of plug-in
architectures. While syntax issues can be dealt with through
generation, plug-in architectures severely limit the ability for build
tools to grow gracefully as projects become more complex. We have come
to feel that plug-ins are the wrong level of abstraction, and prefer
language-based tools like Gradle and Rake instead, because they offer
finer-grained abstractions and more flexibility long term.
Gradle put the fun back into building/assembling software. I used ant to build software my entire career and I have always considered the actual "buildit" part of the dev work being a necessary evil. A few months back our company grew tired of not using a binary repo (aka checking in jars into the vcs) and I was given the task to investigate this. Started with ivy since it could be bolted on top of ant, didn't have much luck getting my built artifacts published like I wanted. I went for maven and hacked away with xml, worked splendid for some simple helper libs but I ran into serious problems trying to bundle applications ready for deploy. Hassled quite a while googling plugins and reading forums and wound up downloading trillions of support jars for various plugins which I had a hard time using. Finally I went for gradle (getting quite bitter at this point, and annoyed that "It shouldn't be THIS hard!")
But from day one my mood started to improve. I was getting somewhere. Took me like two hours to migrate my first ant module and the build file was basically nothing. Easily fitted one screen. The big "wow" was: build scripts in xml, how stupid is that? the fact that declaring one dependency takes ONE row is very appealing to me -> you can easily see all dependencies for a certain project on one page. From then on I been on a constant roll, for every problem I faced so far there is a simple and elegant solution. I think these are the reasons:
groovy is very intuitive for java developers
documentation is great to awesome
the flexibility is endless
Now I spend my days trying to think up new features to add to our build process. How sick is that?
It's also much easier to manage native builds. Ant and Maven are effectively Java-only. Some plugins exist for Maven that try to handle some native projects, but they don't do an effective job. Ant tasks can be written that compile native projects, but they are too complex and awkward.
We do Java with JNI and lots of other native bits. Gradle simplified our Ant mess considerably. When we started to introduce dependency management to the native projects it was messy. We got Maven to do it, but the equivalent Gradle code was a tiny fraction of what was needed in Maven, and people could read it and understand it without becoming Maven gurus.
I agree partly with Ed Staub. Gradle definitely is more powerful compared to maven and provides more flexibility long term.
After performing an evaluation to move from maven to gradle, we decided to stick to maven itself for two issues
we encountered with gradle ( speed is slower than maven, proxy was not working ) .
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This might be a stupid question. Currently in my company the usage of gradle is starting to emerge. I have been learning about the basic of gradle and use it for my small projects.
Because of gradle's flexibility, the usage can be very vast. I'm coming from maven and now I'm confused about the role of gradle in our project as it is a general-purpose tool.
Here are some of the usages that pops questions in my head:
Gradle tasks are treated as CLI sub commands. The command line arguments are passed as properties. It seems to me that the project can just be written as a normal java/groovy that uses library common-cli or args4j that are already quite mature (supporting help, usage, etc).
Some of the sub projects are checked out using gradle instead of using the svn:externals.
My question is not about how?, it's more about should it?
Gradle gives you a lot of flexibility, indeed. As it uses Groovy - you can really create all kind of workflows and commands. I'm not sure if this is the best practice though.
The best is when you can leverage the declarative side of Gradle (via Java plugin), the same way as you do with Maven - build by conventions, and then you may have customizations if you need to do something extra with the build artifacts. So Gradle is a kind of a tool that merges all the benefits from Maven and Ant, replacing XML with Groovy DSL.
What you described sounds more like a project with a very custom structure and the only thing you actually leveraged is the task execution engine. Same you would do with Ant. But you didn't mention, for instance, if you're using plugins.
Some of the sub projects are checked out using gradle instead of using
the svn:externals
I think you could do the same with any other build tool out there. To me it sounds quite strange - there's already a CLI tool for that (svn, git, hg, ). Probably the person who established this had a desperate wish to accommodate all the commands into one tool, which is some cases may be quite useful, why not. But as you didn't provide more context, this all sounds like an overuse of scripting and over-engineering.
The features that are in gradle page shows a lot about this tool.
Gradle has the flexibility of ant and the conventions of Maven. Gradle can use ANT and Maven. Everything in Groovy.
Features
Declarative builds and build-by-convention
Gradle uses DSL(Domain Specific Language) based on Groovy.
Language for dependency based programming
The tasks are based in a hierarchy, favoring the builds
Structure your build
Easy to compose buid from reusable pieces
Deep API
Allow to monitor and customize the configuration and behavior execution
Scalability
Reusability allows one project uses parts of other projects increasing the produtivity
Multi-project builds
You can rebuild a project or its sub-project, that depends on another sub-project.
Different ways to manage dependencies
Maven has just one way. Can integrate with maven and ivy, or just use jars or directories.
Groovy
Insteady of XML.
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I have an ant script which produces a custom version of tomcat for use on my servers. This ant script does the following:
unzip a pristine copy of a tomcat .zip file
delete a bunch of files that are not used
Add a bunch of jars to the tomcat\lib folder like database drivers and others
zip it all back up into a zip file
I noticed that there is an ant run plugin for maven at http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin/ but the documentation indicates that this ant run plugin should be used sparingly.
What maven plugins are available for doing basic file io operations such as copy, unzip, delete, rename, move, zip, ... etc?
For unzipping a file the best solution is to use the maven-dependency-plugin furthermore for packaging an archive like zip you can use the maven-assembly-plugin
There are some plugins as others have mentioned, but the whole point of maven is that you shouldn't need those basic file operations. Maven operates on a higher level of abstraction, and stuff like having jars in the lib folder etc should be handled through module dependencies, and not with explicit copy tasks.
If you want to stick to lower level "basic file operations", ant is better bet than maven. Maven is designed to get rid of those operations as much as possible by rethinking your approach.
If you already have an ant script that works, don't waste your time rewriting it. Just use the antrun plugin. Like eis says, Maven operates at a higher level, so usually you shouldn't need to muck about with files.