winery

Use Maven as build tool

Context and Problem Statement

Which build tool should be used?

Considered Options

• Maven
• Gradle
• Ant

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: “Maven”, because

• None of Gradle’s customizability and the overhead in setup that comes with that is required.
• The structure the comes with Maven makes the build files easier to understand compared to ANT.

Pros and Cons of the Options

Maven

• Good, because most of Eclipse projects use Maven for building.
• Good, because there is a plugin for almost everything
• Good, because it has good integration with third party tools
• Good, because it has robust performance
• Good, because it has a high popularity
• Good, if one favors declarative over imperative
• Bad, because getting a dependency list is not straight forward
• Bad, because it based on a fixed and linear model of phases
• Bad, because it is hard to customize
• Bad, because it needs plugins for everything
• Bad, because it is verbose leading to huge build files

Gradle

• Good, because its build scripts are short
• Good, because it follows the convention over configuration approach
• Good, because it offers a graph-based task dependencies
• Good, because it is easy to customize
• Good, because it offers custom dependency scopes
• Good, because it has good community support
• Good, because its performance can be 100 times more than maven’s performance.
• Bad, because not that many plugins are available/maintained yet
• Bad, because it lacks a wide variety of application server integrations
• Bad, because it has a medium popularity
• Bad, because it allows custom build scripts which need to be debugged

Ant

• Good, because it offers a lot of control over the build process
• Good, because it has an agile dependency manager
• Good, because it has a low learning curve
• Bad, because build scripts can quickly become huge
• Bad, because everything has to be written from scratch
• Bad, because no conventions are enforced which can make it hard to understand someone else’s build script
• Bad, because it has nearly no community support
• Bad, because it has a low popularity
• Bad, because it offers too much freedom

Links

• GADR: https://github.com/adr/gadr-java/blob/master/gadr-java--build-tool.md

License

Copyright (c) 2018 Contributors to the Eclipse Foundation

See the NOTICE file(s) distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0 which is available at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0, or the Apache Software License 2.0 which is available at https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0 OR Apache-2.0

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