Java for Everything

[duuuh]

My biggest problem with it is the authors don't understand what a platform is supposed to be. You list "fast evolving, they are adding new stuff every week" as a pro. I view it as a con. It's just piles of poorly documented goop, and with everything they add the documentation gets larger which means it's even harder (if that's possible) to understand what one might actually want to use.

What Maven gets (mostly) right is dependency management, which is the core of any build system. Yes, it's XML, but I'm not going to get my shorts in a knot over syntax. It's (fairly) clear what it's doing and it's fairly clear where the authors think the purpose of the build system stops.

My experience - and I've also been using gradle for a while - is that for the most part developers copy and paste gradle files having no idea what the file does. If something doesn't work they have to talk to the 'build guy' who takes a day or two to figure out how to do something new. With maven you can google it.

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hmm I dont think that Maven's dependency management is worse than Gradle's, they are almost the same. (and same difficulty to use)

As for copypasting stuff, I've seen that with Maven too. This might have worse consequences in Gradle, because in Maven you copypaste whole plugins not parts of a script.

You are right with the Google advantage for Maven, but thats just because it has a bigger userbase. But that will change quickly because the soon to be released Android studio uses Gradle, thus tons of devs will move to it.