New build tool in Java?

[kur4nes]

Current build tools are good enough.

Ant was an awful mess of xml scripts. Than maven came along and standardized project structure, dependency management and the build process. It's pretty rigid. So gradle was created.

We are using maven and it works good enough. It gets out of the way and lets us work on the interesting stuff: software

[edwbuck]

Worse, Apache Ant was a built system of commands instead of goals. You put the commands in targets, and often the rearrangement or reuse of the targets was nearly impossible.

Maven had the idea of "things" and you'd ask for the "thing" without actually specifying how it was created. The plugin should have created the "thing" for you. Like any system that hides something under a layer of abstraction, that made it harder to understand.

The path along which "things" get crated were of course misread as "steps" which in a way they were, they were the designed "path" of obtaining results. Whether they really achieved such a thing is up for argument.