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Comment by jbrackett | Hacker News Reader

You should take a look at http://www.gradle.org/ if you haven't already. I worked on an ant project and decided we needed to convert to a better build system. I started down the path of Maven, but Gradle changed my mind because of the conciseness.

It uses the groovy language so hopefully it doesn't fall into the same trap as described in the post.

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Gradle has given me a lot of headaches for small projects. I keep going back to it now and then and run into performance issues with it where builds that take 10 seconds in Maven take 10 min in Gradle.

It's something about the dependency resolution mechanism. Something is broken, but I haven't been able to pin-point it yet.

It's frustrating because I love Groovy. I write a lot of Groovy and I'd love to use a Groovy-based build tool, but I can't justify wasting a lot of time on Gradle when I know how to do what I need to do in Maven.

I've used Gradle on a handful of small projects and am very surprised that you're seeing an order of magnitude difference between a Maven build and a Gradle one. Can you provide a little more detail about what the script was doing for 10 minutes?

Last time I used it which was right around when 1.3 was released I turned on debug logging while the project built so I could see what was causing the issues. It was hanging long periods of time around a task I had to make a fat jar. If I remember correctly it was having some real trouble with locks on Ivy caches... I tried clearing out the Gradle caches and that did not resolve the problem. Since that was a small project I was able to replace the build file with a POM and assembly descriptor be done with it.

If I get some more time to play around I might go back and try and collect some more info for a bug report... I have had this issue since the late Gradle betas each time I go back to using Gradle I hope the problem is resolved.

Well, 1.4 claims to have improvements to dependency resolution, so soon you should be able to take another kick at the football soon. I'm growing to like Gradle more and more and haven't seen any problems like this. My major desire is for more/better plugins, but I do think this will become less of an issue. (I'm even hoping to write 1 or 2)

I should also mention that GVMTool is worth checking out if you're on a UNIX-based system. An easy way to install and switch between versions of Gradle and other tools: http://gvmtool.net

> It uses the groovy language so hopefully it doesn't fall into the same trap as described in the post.

The article mentions Gradle :-P Need to read the whole article ;-)

Hrmm that's embarrassing... well it's mentioned below the fold and everyone knows people don't pay attention to that stuff. :)

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