管理本地构建也容易得多。Ant和Maven实际上只支持java。存在一些Maven插件，试图处理一些本地项目，但它们没有有效地完成工作。可以编写Ant任务来编译本地项目，但它们太复杂和笨拙了。

我们用JNI和许多其他原生位来做Java。Gradle大大简化了我们的Ant混乱。当我们开始将依赖管理引入本地项目时，它很混乱。我们让Maven来做这件事，但等效的Gradle代码只是Maven所需要的一小部分，人们可以阅读和理解它，而不必成为Maven专家。

这不是我的答案，但它确实引起了我的共鸣。这是来自ThoughtWorks 2012年10月的“技术雷达”:

Two things have caused fatigue with XML-based build tools like Ant and Maven: too many angry pointy braces and the coarseness of plug-in architectures. While syntax issues can be dealt with through generation, plug-in architectures severely limit the ability for build tools to grow gracefully as projects become more complex. We have come to feel that plug-ins are the wrong level of abstraction, and prefer language-based tools like Gradle and Rake instead, because they offer finer-grained abstractions and more flexibility long term.

Gradle put the fun back into building/assembling software. I used ant to build software my entire career and I have always considered the actual "buildit" part of the dev work being a necessary evil. A few months back our company grew tired of not using a binary repo (aka checking in jars into the vcs) and I was given the task to investigate this. Started with ivy since it could be bolted on top of ant, didn't have much luck getting my built artifacts published like I wanted. I went for maven and hacked away with xml, worked splendid for some simple helper libs but I ran into serious problems trying to bundle applications ready for deploy. Hassled quite a while googling plugins and reading forums and wound up downloading trillions of support jars for various plugins which I had a hard time using. Finally I went for gradle (getting quite bitter at this point, and annoyed that "It shouldn't be THIS hard!")

But from day one my mood started to improve. I was getting somewhere. Took me like two hours to migrate my first ant module and the build file was basically nothing. Easily fitted one screen. The big "wow" was: build scripts in xml, how stupid is that? the fact that declaring one dependency takes ONE row is very appealing to me -> you can easily see all dependencies for a certain project on one page. From then on I been on a constant roll, for every problem I faced so far there is a simple and elegant solution. I think these are the reasons:

Groovy对于Java开发人员来说非常直观 文档是非常棒的 灵活性是无限的

现在，我每天都在努力想出新功能来添加到我们的构建过程中。这有多恶心?

We use Gradle and chose it over Maven and Ant. Ant gave us total flexibility, and Ivy gives better dependency management than Maven, but there isn't great support for multi-project builds. You end up doing a lot of coding to support multi-project builds. Also having some build-by-convention is nice and makes build scripts more concise. With Maven, it takes build by convention too far, and customizing your build process becomes a hack. Also, Maven promotes every project publishing an artifact. Sometimes you have a project split up into subprojects but you want all of the subprojects to be built and versioned together. Not really something Maven is designed for.

With Gradle you can have the flexibility of Ant and build by convention of Maven. For example, it is trivial to extend the conventional build lifecycle with your own task. And you aren't forced to use a convention if you don't want to. Groovy is much nicer to code than XML. In Gradle, you can define dependencies between projects on the local file system without the need to publish artifacts for each to a repository. Finally, Gradle uses Ivy, so it has excellent dependency management. The only real downside for me thus far is the lack of mature Eclipse integration, but the options for Maven aren't really much better.

Gradle很好地结合了Ant和Maven，从这两个框架中取其精华。来自Ant的灵活性和来自Maven的约定优于配置、依赖管理和插件。

因此，如果你想要一个标准的java构建，比如在maven中，但测试任务必须执行一些自定义步骤，它可能如下所示。

build.gradle:

apply plugin:'java'
task test{
  doFirst{
    ant.copy(toDir:'build/test-classes'){fileset dir:'src/test/extra-resources'}
  }
  doLast{
    ...
  }
}

最重要的是，它使用groovy语法，它提供了比ant/maven的xml更强大的表达式。

它是Ant的超集——你可以用更好的、类似groovy的语法在gradle中使用所有Ant任务。

ant.copy(file:'a.txt', toDir:"xyz")

or

ant.with{
  delete "x.txt"
  mkdir "abc"
  copy file:"a.txt", toDir: "abc"
}

我在一定程度上同意Ed Staub的观点。与maven相比，Gradle无疑更强大，从长远来看也提供了更多的灵活性。

在执行从maven到gradle的评估之后，我们决定在两个问题上坚持使用maven本身 我们遇到gradle(速度比maven慢，代理不工作)。