Gradle as build tool

[surlac surlacovich]

Hello Folks.
I have always used ANT to build Android projects, but I see that many projects move to Gradle.
Is it really worth? How about integration with IDEs (my concern is mainly about IntelliJ IDEA)? Why not Maven then?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Android Studio (which is based on IntelliJ) supports the Gradle build system. Since Google works closely with the IntelliJ folks on that I would expect any work to trickle back to the main IntelliJ product sooner rather than later.

As to why not Maven, that could easily escalate in an is-Maven-good-or-bad flamewar :-) My impression is that the Android folks were looking for something flexible and customizable - not Maven's strongest suit.

http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/user-guide talks a little bit about the underlying motivation.

[surlac surlacovich]

Thanks Ulf, very informative.
For me Gradle is something like 'step back' from Maven in direction of Ant (which looks simpler; at the same time Apache IVY is step onward to Maven, by providing dependency management).

Ulf Dittmer wrote:
As to why not Maven, that could easily escalate in an is-Maven-good-or-bad flamewar :-) My impression is that the Android folks were looking for something flexible and customizable - not Maven's strongest suit.

After some using of Gradle, I understand that Gradle config file is much smaller than Maven one. It's just a first impression, I will dig into it to know how it differs in flexible and customizable meanings.