Maven vs Gradle

Support - Assistance technique
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For a quick Friday reading:

Interesting comparison of Maven with a new tool, Gradle (I’m not suggesting a switch, we certainly have many more pressing tasks)

Knut

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Zabil C.M zabilcm@gmail.com
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 6:32 AM
Subject: [OPENMRS-DEV] Maven vs Gradle.

To: openmrs-devel-l@listserv.iupui.edu

Hi All,
Over this week (along with the earlier maven) I was able to integrate a relatively new system gradle (http://gradle.org) as well.

Integrating gradle did not prove out to be tough because gradle understands the maven (or standard) directory layout.

The build files for both maven and gradle and available at the git hub repository

http://github.com/zabil/openmrs

Please note there are some dependencies still missing from the gradle files so test cases don’t run successfully. Compilation and packaging works. you can give gradle a spin by

$ gradle compile -Dskip.test

Here are some points we should consider.

Maven pros

  • Lots of third party plugins for tasks

  • Fairly robust IDE support (eclipse, netbeans, intellij)

  • Dependency management

  • Jetty plugin (you can run the web app off the compiled source with hot deployment)

Maven cons

  • XML based configuration. which usually ends up being very verbose.

  • Writing simple and custom tasks (for instance copy a set of files somewhere) is tedious.

You have to write a plugin and testing + development time for simple tasks may end up too long and time consuming.

For things to go smooth you usually will have to follow maven conventions and standard plugins.

  • Everything is a plugin. Even simple tasks like compile and running tests.

So for a fresh project, downloading all the plugins takes considerable time.

Plus there might be updates to the plugin which will be downloaded occasionally when you run the build.

  • Lots of maven plugins usually have problems and a general opinion is that it is hard to debug.

  • Building is slow compared to ant and gradle

  • Does not prepare the html unit test case report by default (but something called a surefire reports)

Gradle (pros)

  • Based on groovy. Scripting tasks are quite coz it is in a programming language.

  • Uses ivy dependency management (which uses maven repositories). Dependency downloads are quite fast.

  • Integrates ant tasks also.

  • Supports the standard directory layout.

So for compilation, testing and packaging no extra tasks need to be written as long the files are in the layout.

  • Come bundles with a default set of plugins which are core to gradle. So it does not have to download/update plugins

  • Builds are quite fast.

  • Standard junit reports

  • Supports jetty server

Gradle (cons)

  • IDE support or the lack of it. Eclipse does not come with good support for gradle or groovy.

Intellij idea and netbeans supports it (idea supports gradle projects) however.

  • Third party plugin support is not as good as maven

On the whole gradle looks better. If we were to carry out the migrations gradle will prove easier to migrate the current ant tasks, while we have to write plugins for maven to get things working.

Cheers,

Zabil

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Cheers,
Knut Staring