[rozza]

I'm a fan of Gradle, it is super powerful and ultimately flexible and I can code my way into and out of trouble with it.

I like maven for its simplicity, although I do dislike XML for the build configuration language, seems to verbose and outdated. Mavens plugins are elsewhere (eg published jars), but with gradle I can also specialize and have local plugins kept with the code as well as use published plugins. I like that flexibility.

All said, Gradle has changed a lot of over the years and with that its best practices, so many of my projects are way behind the new standard way of doing things. But with either tool once its all up and running maintaining it is relatively simple.

Perhaps the new Amper project by Jetbrains (Gradle configuration via YAML) will simplify things for the 95% of cases and still allow users to extend and fall back to kotlin / groovy configuration where specialization is needed.

[e12e]

Oh no, more yaml? It must be strictly worse than xml and groovy?

Who are these people that enjoy yaml, and why? It's so easy to get indentation and lists wrong (yes, with editor support).

[jeroenhd]

I like yaml. It's easy and readable. It needs a linter, of course, or you end up with unescaped strings and whatnot, but it does its job well. Plus, for the strangely passionate yaml-haters out there, the fact you can feed any modern yaml parser JSON and still make it work is a benefit for those that want to avoid yaml at all costs.

I like XML as well, especially if combined with a clear schema so it's easy to write correct markup.

I can't say I've ever used Groovy. It seems like Kotlin's Gradle DSL has completely replaced it in practice, so I can't really comment on it.

Every configuration format has its pros and cons. It all depends on what you're using it for. I'm not a fan of the endless unstructured yaml in Kubernetes (I'd much rather have something that can be schema checked easily for config that huge) but I wouldn't use Groovy for that either.

[Tmpod]

I hadn't heard about Amper yet, it seems quite neat. Thanks!