[piva00]

Gradle does suck, it gives too much freedom on a tool that should be straightforward and actively design to avoid footguns, it does the opposite by providing a DSL that can create a lot of abstractions to manage dependencies. The only place I worked where the Gradle configuration looked somewhat sane had very strict design guidelines on what was acceptable to be in the Gradle config.

Maven on the other hand, is just plain boring tech that works. There's plenty of documentation on how to use it properly for many different environments/scenarios, it's declarative while enabling plug-ins for bespoke customisations, it has cruft from its legacy but it's quite settled and it just works.

Could Maven be more modern if it was invented now? Yeah, sure, many other package managers were developed since its inception with newer/more polished concepts but it's dependable, well documented, and it just plain works.

[computerdork]

Just wrote a comment how I've always liked Maven. It's perfect for small and medium sized projects, and for service-oriented architectures/microservices - it seems like it was designed for this! It's main goal is to help you figure out the libraries that you're using and build them in a standard way.

It isn't great for really strange and odd builds, but in that case, you should probably be breaking your project down into smaller components (each with it's own maven file) anyways.

[koakuma-chan]

I would disagree that either "plain works" because to even package your app into a self-contained .jar, you need a plugin. I can't recall the specifics now, but years ago I spent many hours fighting both Maven and Gradle.

[piva00]

Well, yes? It's a feature provided by a plugin, like any other feature in Maven, you declare the plugin for creating a fat-jar or single-jar and use that. It's just some lines of XML configuration so it plain works.

Like I said, it's not hypermodern with batteries included, and streamlined for what became more common workflows after it was created but it doesn't need workarounds, it's not complicated to define a plugin to be called in one of the steps of the lifecycle, and it's provided as part of its plugin architecture.

I can understand spending many hours fighting Gradle, even I with plenty of experience with Gradle (begrudgingly, I don't like it at all) still end up fighting its idiocies but Maven... It's like any other tool, you need to learn the basics but after that you will only fight it if you are verging away from the well-documented usage (which are plenty, it's been battle-tested for decades).

[looperhacks]

You "need a plugin" in the sense that every component of maven is a "plugin". The core plugins give you everything you need to build a self-contained jar - if you wanted to, you don't even have to configure the plugins, if you want to write a long cli command instead.