Do we really need another build tool?

Recently I've been getting to know Maven a little bit better. Underneath all the XML fuzz there's a really good, well designed and extremely modular application that does pretty much everything one can ask for (and then some).

With Maven things are simple: bloated XML contains every possible setting for every possible plugin, every possible dependency and what have you. You might hate the fact that it is XML. I say screw it - let's try to live with it.

On many occasions the XML nature has been the corner stone for many people to start developing their own build tools. I'd say their repulsion came from Ant and if so it wasn't totally unjustified. I hate Ant with a passion when it comes to building Java projects. Ant is great for cross-platform imperative tasks (download this, unzip, make a link, go get coffee) but Java projects are a completely different beast. It's not that you can't do it with Ant but rather that it takes forever to do everything (not to mention that everyone is doing it differently).

Like I said people's repulsion to XML configuration files pushed some of them into the hands of Groovy (my absolutely favorite language) to create Gradle. One of my very good friends, Szczepan Faber, works on this tool and I am grateful for his efforts. It makes the landscape of build tools a lot more interesting. It's from diversity that the progress comes in this case.

Being all Groovy geek and loving the language and what one can do with it I must say I am a little bit confused as to why I'd use Gradle. I mean I get that the build file is terse, that the default source/target compiler makes more sense, that I can declare 10 dependencies in one line... But what about plugin support?

From my personal perspective the idea of creating a new tool from scratch is pure nonsense. Maven is the de-factor standard in Java world and not without reason. It does what it does and does it good. Where Maven lacks in features is imperative programming but that can easily be overcome with either custom Maven plugins or GMaven plugin. For me it'd make a lot more sense if Gradle adopted the Maven API for plugins and build on that to gain the much needed functionality into the fold before it is missing.

Like I said before, I get that one can feel intimidated by all the XML in Maven builds. I get that one can mess things up with Maven really bad. I also get that Gradle, Buildr and others might be better in some cases. What I hate about the overall landscape is that the plugins for build systems aren't compatible and even if I'd like to use Gradle to build my next gen rocking cool enterprise java application I'd dead in the water pretty soon because the EAR/EJB archive support in Gradle is non-existent. I hope this changes some day...

Have a nice day!