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I'm working on a Linux/Apache/MySQL/Grails application and have the choice of build tools. I'm looking at Gradle or Gant. They look very similar to me, so I'm not sure what differentiates them.
What are the major differences between Gradle and Gant that would make me pick one over the other?
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Gradle is definitely a popular technology in the Java community. More and more open-source projects are using it and it's the defacto standard build tool for Android. It promises a shorter and compact DSL, flexibility and high performance.
Gradle is more standardized than Ant in case of flexibility. It is less flexible than Gradle. Gradle supports multi-project build. It does not support multi-project build.
The biggest differences are Gradle's mechanisms for work avoidance and incrementality. The top 3 features that make Gradle much faster than Maven are: Incrementality — Gradle avoids work by tracking input and output of tasks and only running what is necessary, and only processing files that changed when possible.
Gradle is between 7 and 85 times faster than Maven when building incremental changes; benefits increase with number of subprojects. Gradle builds are 3 to 30 times faster than Maven builds when task outputs can be resolved Gradle's build cache.
The main difference is that Gant is a build tool, while Gradle is a project management tool (from the dev/ops standpoint).
So Gradle, compared to Gant, comes "battery included", because it allows you to easily use plugins, manage dependencies, has a complete, hookable, lifecycle, etc...
It is a bit like comparing Ant and Maven, stricly looking on the Java side.
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The major reasons you would likely pick Gradle over Gant:
Beyond that Gradle has a plugin architecture, is DSL based, integrates with Maven and Ivy and has true incremental builds. Gant was a valuable innovation in its time, the lessons of which are in Gradle.
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