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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Java Build Tools
  5. Apache Ant vs Bazel vs Gradle

Apache Ant vs Bazel vs Gradle

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Gradle
Gradle
Stacks24.3K
Followers9.8K
Votes254
GitHub Stars18.1K
Forks5.0K
Apache Ant
Apache Ant
Stacks250
Followers151
Votes7
GitHub Stars449
Forks449
Bazel
Bazel
Stacks313
Followers579
Votes133

Apache Ant vs Bazel vs Gradle: What are the differences?

Introduction

Apache Ant, Bazel, and Gradle are popular build tools used in software development. Each tool has its own set of features, advantages, and differences from one another.

  1. Build File Configuration: In Apache Ant, build files are XML-based, which can be verbose and cumbersome to maintain for large projects. Bazel uses a combination of BUILD files and custom DSL, offering a more concise and flexible configuration. Gradle uses Groovy or Kotlin DSL for build scripts, providing a more readable and maintainable configuration compared to Apache Ant.

  2. Build Performance: Bazel is known for its fast, incremental builds due to its unique dependency management system. Gradle also offers efficient incremental builds, but Apache Ant lacks built-in support for incremental compilation, which can result in slower build times for larger projects.

  3. Build Scalability: Bazel is designed for large-scale projects with massive codebases, offering robust support for distributed caching and remote execution. Gradle also supports large projects but may face scalability challenges compared to Bazel. Apache Ant, on the other hand, is often not the preferred choice for large-scale projects due to its limitations in scalability.

  4. Plugin Ecosystem: Gradle has a rich plugin ecosystem with extensive community-maintained plugins available through the Gradle Plugin Portal. Bazel also has a growing ecosystem of plugins, although it may not be as vast as Gradle's. Apache Ant has fewer third-party plugins available, which can limit its extensibility in comparison to Gradle and Bazel.

  5. Language Support: Bazel supports multiple programming languages out of the box, including Java, C++, and Python, making it suitable for polyglot projects. Gradle also offers support for various languages through plugins and built-in functionality. In contrast, Apache Ant is primarily focused on Java projects, lacking native support for other programming languages.

  6. Community Adoption: Gradle has gained widespread adoption in the software development community, with many companies and open-source projects using it as their build tool of choice. Bazel also has a growing community of users and contributors, particularly in the tech industry. While Apache Ant remains in use for legacy projects, its popularity has declined in favor of more modern build tools like Gradle and Bazel.

In Summary, Apache Ant, Bazel, and Gradle each offer unique features and capabilities tailored to different project requirements, with differences in build file configuration, build performance, scalability, plugin ecosystem, language support, and community adoption.

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Detailed Comparison

Gradle
Gradle
Apache Ant
Apache Ant
Bazel
Bazel

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

Declarative builds and build-by-convention;Language for dependency based programming;Structure your build;Deep API;Gradle scales;Multi-project builds;Many ways to manage your dependencies;Gradle is the first build integration tool
The most complete Java build and deployment tool available.;Platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators;Can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command;Scripts are written using plain XML. If you are already familiar with XML, you can learn pretty quickly;Automate complicated repetitive tasks;Interface to develop custom tasks;Can be easily invoked from the command line and it can integrate with free and commercial IDEs
Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
GitHub Stars
18.1K
GitHub Stars
449
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
449
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
24.3K
Stacks
250
Stacks
313
Followers
9.8K
Followers
151
Followers
579
Votes
254
Votes
7
Votes
133
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 110
    Flexibility
  • 51
    Easy to use
  • 47
    Groovy dsl
  • 22
    Slow build time
  • 10
    Crazy memory leaks
Cons
  • 8
    Inactionnable documentation
  • 6
    It is just the mess of Ant++
  • 4
    Hard to decide: ten or more ways to achieve one goal
  • 2
    Bad Eclipse tooling
  • 2
    Dependency on groovy
Pros
  • 4
    Flexible
  • 1
    Simple
  • 1
    Easy to learn
  • 1
    Easy to write own java-build-hooks
Cons
  • 1
    Old and not widely used anymore
  • 1
    Slow
Pros
  • 28
    Fast
  • 20
    Deterministic incremental builds
  • 17
    Correct
  • 16
    Multi-language
  • 14
    Enforces declared inputs/outputs
Cons
  • 3
    No Windows Support
  • 2
    Bad IntelliJ support
  • 1
    Lack of Documentation
  • 1
    Constant breaking changes
  • 1
    Poor windows support for some languages
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Java
Java
Objective-C
Objective-C
C++
C++

What are some alternatives to Gradle, Apache Ant, Bazel?

Apache Maven

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Pants

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

JitPack

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.

Buck

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

Please

Please

Please is a cross-language build system with an emphasis on high performance, extensibility and reproduceability. It supports a number of popular languages and can automate nearly any aspect of your build process.

CMake

CMake

It is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of the user's choice.

Sonatype Nexus

Sonatype Nexus

It is an open source repository that supports many artifact formats, including Docker, Java™ and npm. With the Nexus tool integration, pipelines in your toolchain can publish and retrieve versioned apps and their dependencies

JFrog Artifactory

JFrog Artifactory

It integrates with your existing ecosystem supporting end-to-end binary management that overcomes the complexity of working with different software package management systems, and provides consistency to your CI/CD workflow.

EventBus

EventBus

It enables central communication to decoupled classes with just a few lines of code – simplifying the code, removing dependencies, and speeding up app development.

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