- Maven and Gradle are both powerful build tools and dependency management systems commonly used in Java (and other JVM-based languages) for building and managing projects
Timeline
Maven came first, and Gradle was developed later as an alternative build tool. Here’s a brief timeline:
- Maven
- Introduced in 2004, Maven 1.0 aimed to address some challenges in building software projects, including dependency management, project structure, and the need for a standardised build tool in the JVM ecosystem
- Gradle
- Gradle was introduced in 2007 as a response to the limitations and challenges that existing build tools like Ant and Maven had
- Gradle was designed to be flexible, extensible, and provide better performance
Differences
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DSL (Domain Specific Language)
- Maven uses XML based DSL configuration
- Gradle uses a more concise and expressive Groovy based DSL
- Gradle later extended support for kotlin based DSL as well
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Incremental builds
- Gradle offered incremental builds through build caching since the start
- Maven didn’t support incremental builds until Maven 3.9.0
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Dependency Scopes
- Maven has few built-in dependency scopes, which can lead to challenges in certain scenarios like managing test fixtures or code generation
- Gradle allows for custom dependency scopes, providing better modelled faster builds
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Dependency Conflict Resoultion
- Maven’s dependency conflict resolution works with a shortest path approach, which can be influenced by declaration ordering
- Gradle offers full conflict resolution, selecting the highest version of a dependency found in the graph. Additionally, Gradle allows for declaring versions as “strictly,” enabling them to take precedence over transitive versions, allowing for more control over dependencies
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Composite Builds
- Gradle enables the creation of composite builds, where multiple source projects can be built together
- This feature is not as straightforward in Maven
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Optional dependencies and feature variants
- Gradle fully supports feature variants and optional dependencies, providing more flexibility in managing dependencies based on project requirements
- Maven, on the other hand, only allows publishers to provide metadata through optional dependencies as documentation
Some if not most of the features that Maven lacked earlier have been covered for in the later versions of Maven through plugins, still a lot of the above mentioned features are easier to work with in Gradle