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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Java Build Tools
  5. Gradle vs Please

Gradle vs Please

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Gradle
Gradle
Stacks24.3K
Followers9.8K
Votes254
GitHub Stars18.1K
Forks5.0K
Please
Please
Stacks13
Followers14
Votes4
GitHub Stars2.6K
Forks210

Gradle vs Please: What are the differences?

  1. Build Tool Type: Gradle is a build automation tool that focuses on flexibility and extensibility, allowing for customizations and diverse build scenarios, while Please is a build tool that emphasizes hermetic builds to ensure reproducibility and reliability in the build process.

  2. Language Support: Gradle supports multiple languages and platforms, making it versatile for a wide range of projects, whereas Please is primarily designed for building software written in languages like Python, Java, Go, and C++.

  3. Build Cache Functionality: Gradle offers a sophisticated build cache system that can significantly speed up build times by reusing outputs from previous builds, while Please also integrates a build cache mechanism but focuses more on ensuring reproducibility and avoiding caching non-hermetic dependencies.

  4. Dependency Management: Gradle has a powerful dependency management system that can handle complex dependencies efficiently, with support for transitive dependencies and version conflicts resolution, while Please simplifies dependency management by using build rules that explicitly define dependencies and provide clear visibility into the dependency graph.

  5. Community Support: Gradle has a large and active community with extensive documentation, plugins, and support resources available, making it easier to find solutions and leverage community-contributed plugins, whereas Please is a relatively newer tool with a smaller community, resulting in fewer plugins and community resources.

  6. Integration with Bazel: Gradle can integrate with Bazel, another popular build tool, to leverage its advantages in scalability and performance for larger projects, while Please does not have direct integration with Bazel and operates as a standalone build tool.

In Summary, Gradle and Please differ in their build tool type, language support, build cache functionality, dependency management, community support, and integration with Bazel.

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Detailed Comparison

Gradle
Gradle
Please
Please

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.

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.

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
Build files; Build targets; Build labels
Statistics
GitHub Stars
18.1K
GitHub Stars
2.6K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
210
Stacks
24.3K
Stacks
13
Followers
9.8K
Followers
14
Votes
254
Votes
4
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
  • 1
    No single WORKSPACE file that nobody owns or understand
  • 1
    Built-in languages are defined in the same language
  • 1
    Multi-language
  • 1
    IntelliJ support
Cons
  • 1
    No Windows support
Integrations
No integrations available
Python
Python
Java
Java
C++
C++
Golang
Golang

What are some alternatives to Gradle, Please?

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.

Bazel

Bazel

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.

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.

Apache Ant

Apache Ant

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.

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.

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