Gradle

Gradle is a project automation tool that borrows a lot of concepts from Maven. It differs from Maven in using a Groovy-based declarative syntax instead of XML.

Note

Read more about Gradle at https://gradle.org. And, head over to http://www.groovy-lang.org for an introduction to Groovy.

Gradle has become a popular alternative to Maven for its flexibility and neater declarative syntax, while still offering powerful dependency management. We will take a quick look at dependency management in the next section.

Dependency management in Gradle

Gradle offers dependency resolution. It can be set up to use Maven's Central Repository. Let's consider a sample Gradle build (in a file called build.gradle):

apply plugin: 'java'

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

We instructed Gradle that we want to build a Java project and that the dependencies should be fetched from Maven's Central Repository. Now, we can simply declare the dependencies we require as follows:

dependencies...