It's interesting to see the popularity of testing frameworks, continuous integration, and static code analysis in the Java community.
What do people think about Gradle as a build tool (versus Maven)?
What do people think about Gradle as a build tool (versus Maven)?
> In the past, Maven (64%) and Ant + Ivy (16.5%) have been more or less neck and neck. Indeed, we believe that many developers often use both in different ways on complex projects – in 2012, 67% of respondents used Maven and 48% used Ant. [...] Ant with or without Ivy is only one-third as commonplace as it was reported in 2012. The rapid increase of Gradle (11%) is also interesting to witness. Since 2012, Gradle use has more than doubled
The 2014 question was what build tool is used most often, whereas the 2012 figures are for what build tool was used, with some overlap.
So Maven use has stayed high for those using it, whereas Ant users have either given up on it, use Maven more often, or have switched to Gradle (which is still Ant).
I wouldn't trust the download numbers given by the Gradleware CEO, though. The Groovy ecosystem has a long history of fabricating numbers, e.g. look at https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics and see 865,000 downloads of Groovy in the past month, then click on country and see 822,000 of them are from China, and only 17,000 from the US.
Maybe one day Gradle will suck less than Maven, but currently I think they're about the same.