About Keyhole Software
In the early days of Java development, we either didn’t see much of a need for build tools, or used what we had from other environments. I can still remember building shell scripts and make files for developing Java. The make files were especially interesting, because this was a tool that just wasn’t designed with Java in mind. It was also difficult to move to different operating system environments.
Where I was working back in those days, we developed on Solaris, but we had some projects that existed on both Windows and Solaris – which was one of the reasons we found and began using the ‘new’ language, at least new back then. This made the shell scripts impossible to use, and the make files difficult at best.
When Ant came out, we jumped at it. Like the language we were working in, it was cross-platform. That was a huge benefit to us.
I remember when Maven came up, there was some resistance, because we had Ant. But by this time, some projects had become large enough, and complicated enough, that it was painful to write and maintain the Ant files. With the advent of war files and loading dependency jars from the classpath, it was also becoming distracting to find, download, and install all the dependency jars for each project. Maven’s promise of dependency management and the simplification of build by convention made this tool a must-have on several projects. Many of the shops I’ve worked in over the years have embraced the features that Maven brings to the programming environment.
Source : http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/09/gradle-do-we-need-another-build-tool.html
