Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven
I moved from Maven to Gradle about two years ago and I am not going to look back.<p>I understand the arguments made in article and I am the Gradle ninja in my project so I may have subjective view on the whole topic.<p>My points:<p>- Maven requires a lot of boilerplate for everything. Copy-paste. I need to instruct everybody on what to copy, where to paste, and how to edit and what they should not touch under any circumstances.<p>- Gradle... It&#x27;s an environment for programmer! I just write a bunch of code in Kotlin so that all 100 projects have a bit of my custom DSL that suits the needs of our application. The code takes the DSL and does all the job behind the scenes and most developers don&#x27;t need to understand it. They can, but they don&#x27;t need to. This is how it is supposed to work -- in a large project people specialize and the application should be created in a way that will allow people to not have to understand everything.<p>- Maven is strictly declarative. If you can&#x27;t find a plugin you either dig up Ant or you have to write your own plugin. Not nice.<p>- In Gradle I can have almost everything declarative but I have the freedom to drop this bit of logic where it is really needed.<p>- Don&#x27;t try to make it too complex just because you start using Gradle. Great power comes with great responsibility.<p>If I wanted to change one thing in Gradle it would be for the Gradle project to focus on debugging. I really find it difficult to figure out why things fail even though I have almost 20 years of experience with various languages and a decade of very intimate experience with Java. Make it easier so that people are not put off.