Gradle Build Tool Pros and Cons

I am an IT sector specialist, I have been using the Gradle software more than 3 years, I really like this application because it is very good tool to build up the application. It uses the cashes of the built libraries and every time it is not building the entire application and it is free charge to use.. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As I mentioned that I am an IT sector specialist, and more or less I have enough experience to see the constraints of the Gradle. What I really do not like on this tool it sometimes uses the old cashes and it may affect your productivity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Gradle integrates all my Android 3rd party packages automatically while in my IDE Android Studio. I also like that Gradle handles all the command line statements needed without me having to know what to run in my Android command line. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I didn't really like the fact that Gradle often took a long time to run its automated builds, such as when first opening an Android project. It often took upwards of 20-30 minutes to run each build and it became a significant annoyance when building and opening my Android projects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gradle is better than maven for configurations control Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Need to remember the tasks for gradle to execute Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very fast compilation which is incremental and build time Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The rules for inclusion or exclusion and the configuration steps with different versions Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

a) easy to understand and easy to include dependencies.

b) It's quite simple to write an additional plugin if that's necessary

c) Provides support for Groovy

d) The gradle wrapper is awesome because it allows to use Gradle without installing it Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really could not find any cons of using gradle. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the best available build tools for Android development. You can write custom tasks required in your build. Easy to configure build according to specific business requirement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Takes a bit long time to build and memory hungry. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gradle is the best automatic build tool available in market at this moment. Its easy to add dependencies, apply pugins. Its completely automated and provides option of multi module builds. Much more easy to use than ANT or Maven, supports finalizers, dry runs and it builds automatically when source changes. Its available in all major IDEs like intellij idea, Eclipse etc through plugins. Moreover, POM metadata is supported. SO bye bye ugly xml dependency declaration and hello compile' .. .' Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is nothing to dislike except the speed of build. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to download the dependencies and if network connection ids interrupted, it stays in that state for a very long time. There must be some mechanism to determine loss of connectivity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Unlike similar build tools in JVM ecosystem, Gradle does use XML but rather a flexible DSL based on the Groovy programming language. This leads to a short and clean build configuration files. In addition, Gradle is the de facto build tool for Android which means it has a wide adoption. Also, Gradle DSL is designed to solve divers problems that face developers as part of the software life cycle like: compilation, testing, static analysis, packaging and deployment. Thus, it integrates easily with continuous delivery workflows.

Furthermore, Gradle support a parallel execution mode which may speed up it's tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gradle learning curve is more demanding than other build tools, and there it needs some special preparation to start using it. For most Java projects, Maven works just fine so some people will not bother switching to another build tool with a completely different approach. Gradle is flexible, it allows to script anything but this means for large teams it will be harder to maintain a standard workflow (test, build, delivery). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This product is the best i have encountered till now. Gradle integrates with everything that I use. One of the best things about it that it is tightly integrated with the command line. It provides easy access to run or debug one or more task from console and also streamlines the output also. Gradle automatically detects changes in Gradle files and updates the project structure accordingly. The dependency analyser is also a plus one for it as lists resolved dependencies, shows conflicts and allows dependencies to be upgrade when newer versions are available. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apart from all the features it provides, it really gets slow when you try to build large projects. I don't know about the new version but the performance speed could be improved. I heard that it is improved in the recent version. One more issue I faced with Gradle is lack of native support for reusing ivy.xml (and ivysettings.xml), despite the fact that Gradle actually uses Ivy as its dependency engine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Makes building Java projects very easy, and relative to other tools, such as Ant, Gradle is much easier to read.

It is also typically easy to get Gradle to agree with what you are trying to do, but can on occasion be fussy.

Having migrated from using plain old Ant files, using Gradle has made working with Java projects much easier than it was before. Adding thirdparty libraries, for instance, is much easier to do and understand. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Gradle is powerful and flexible, when there are issues they can be difficult to understand at first, and on more than one occasion I found it easier to just blow away a project and rebuild it again in a different directory, as it is typically easier to start fresh and not make mistakes than to fix made errors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.