Technology radar [1] said 'Adopt' in 2013: "Language-based build tools like Gradle and Rake continue to offer finer-grained abstractions and more flexibility long term than XML and plug-in based tools like Ant and Maven. This allows them to grow gracefully as projects become more complex."
My personal opinion after managing the build system of a fairly complex java project for years, I'm glad we skipped Maven in the evolution. For me the most important part was error messages, and the most helpful were Ant > Gradle > Maven. We had very different conventions than what Maven offered, and shaping it to our process was cumbersome. Coupled with Maven 2.x and 3.x never played nicely together (at least for me), now when I see a Maven build I just sigh (looking at you Atlassian)
Finally, strictly personal observation, but Ant/Maven tend to correlate with SVN (or older VCS) usage, which you can argue still does its job, but is pretty much considered obsolete.
Watch for complexity. Circa 2000 when Ant was popular I leveraged jython and inlined small python scripts into the rewrite of a grossly hairy onion of make, shell, and perl scripts that comprised a build system for a sprawling collection of JDK1.2/1.3 apps. In hindsight, this was probably a mistake because it solved the problems of "We can't manage this!" and "Anything outside the JVM is not portable!" it made very little inroad against complexity.
Thanks, this is helpful! I didn't know about Technology Radar before now. Interestingly, they say "Subversion moves back into the Adopt section of the radar because it is a solid version control tool suitable for most teams."
My personal opinion after managing the build system of a fairly complex java project for years, I'm glad we skipped Maven in the evolution. For me the most important part was error messages, and the most helpful were Ant > Gradle > Maven. We had very different conventions than what Maven offered, and shaping it to our process was cumbersome. Coupled with Maven 2.x and 3.x never played nicely together (at least for me), now when I see a Maven build I just sigh (looking at you Atlassian)
Finally, strictly personal observation, but Ant/Maven tend to correlate with SVN (or older VCS) usage, which you can argue still does its job, but is pretty much considered obsolete.
[1] https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/a-z#gradle