Gradle is a project automation tool that borrows a lot of concepts from Maven. It differs from Maven in using a Groovy-based declarative syntax instead of XML.
Note
Read more about Gradle at https://gradle.org. And, head over to http://www.groovy-lang.org for an introduction to Groovy.
Gradle has become a popular alternative to Maven for its flexibility and neater declarative syntax, while still offering powerful dependency management. We will take a quick look at dependency management in the next section.
Gradle offers dependency resolution. It can be set up to use Maven's Central Repository. Let's consider a sample Gradle build (in a file called build.gradle):
apply plugin: 'java'
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}We instructed Gradle that we want to build a Java project and that the dependencies should be fetched from Maven's Central Repository. Now, we can simply declare the dependencies we require as follows:
dependencies {
runtime group: 'org.hibernate...