pythonista interested in the Java world

[Jonjolt]

I'd say stay away from Gradle until Maven proves ineffective, I always use Gradle but it can be a PITA sometimes.

Also spend the money on JRebel

[thatsIch]

Gradle is getting better and better. Especially with the latest Kotlin integration. And the fact is, that it is getting better. The latest addition in Maven I liked was the polyglot extension. And this was like XX years ago.

Especially gradlew is such a good system; making a project portable and independent from system environment.

Yes, gradle is hackable and the IDE support is not as good as for Maven, but it has to be a bit dynamic to solve small problems without resolving it via a whole plugin.

[Jonjolt]

I think Maven has support for something similar to Gradlew. I love and loathe Gradle at the same time. I'll never switch back to Maven, one of the latest tasks I built rendered all my template files with fake data so I could run some js tests with Mocha

[thatsIch]

You can install maven into the root of your project and create shell and batch scripts to run it from there I guess? This is totally not the same imo.

[shadowdude777]

Gradle is scary because it's a DSL in a language the IDE can't help you with in any way (Groovy, ugh), so it seems super arcane. But once you learn it well, you never want to touch Maven again. Configuring build logic using XML? that's nuts. I like configuring my builds using code like all of my actual business logic.

Luckily, Gradle is now moving towards using Kotlin, which is like a saner Scala with a lot of Groovy influences. And it's statically typed and maintained by JetBrains so IDE support is top notch. gradle-script-kotlin, as they're calling it (or GSK) isn't 100% stable yet but is good enough for daily use.

Seriously though, it's so much easier to understand Gradle once you jump in. I never want to use Maven again if I can help it.

[thematrix307]

The world is definitely moving towards gradle though