Why Maven or Gradle come into picture? [closed]

Question

I know core Java, I want to learn Maven/Gradle. But I want to know why maven or gradle is required. is there any way to understand the problem we would face without maven or gradle. I want to know the procedure to build it without using build tools. A technology emerges for solving any issue. I want to know the issue Java developers were facing.

Answer 1

Why Maven or Gradle come into picture?

Because building non-trivial applications by running javac from the command line leads to mistakes, non-reproducible builds and so on.

The history is roughly as follows

• Running javac by hand is tedious and unreliable.
• Shell scripts that run javac etc are cumbersome, and a maintenance burden.
• Make came next¹, but Make didn't understand Java, so you ended up recompiling a lot of Java classes unnecessarily.
• Then came Ant, but that didn't understand Java library dependencies. (That lead to the practice of embedding copies of JARs for dependencies into the repositories of the projects that use them. And consequent difficulties.)
• Then came Maven which provided a system to describe and manage dependencies. Also it introduced a standard way of structuring the code and non-code files in a project.
• Then came Gradle which has a more flexible (non-linear) model of how tasks are performed. And performance.
• Then came Bazel which is more focused on reproducibility of builds.

The differences between Maven, Gradle and Bazel are more pronounced for large projects.

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^{1 - "Next" in terms of its use for Java builds. The Make tool itself predates Java by many years.}