I attended the talk on Gradle by Hans Doktor tonight and while I found myself agreeing that Maven is wholly unsatisfactory I did end up thinking that actually our expectations of build tools in the Java space are really low. What kind of things does Gradle offer us? Proper event interception, genuine integration with the build lifecycle, build targets dynamically defined at runtime, a directed cyclic dependency graph.

Looking at the list some of things you can’t believe are not part of our standard build package. We should be able to know when a build starts and stops and be able to attach code to those events. We should have decent target resolution that avoids duplication of tasks.

Gradle is head and shoulders about the morass that is Maven and is clearly superior to the ageing but faithful Ant but that it manages to be so on so little functionality is a shame.