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Feb 12, 2024

Gradle vs Yeoman

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Gradle
16.9K
9.5K
+ 1
254
Yeoman
1.7K
1.3K
+ 1
396
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Gradle vs Yeoman: What are the differences?

What is Gradle? A powerful build system for the JVM. 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.

What is Yeoman? A set of tools for automating development workflow. Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps. It is comprised of yo - a scaffolding tool using our generator system, grunt - a task runner for your build process and bower for dependency management.

Gradle and Yeoman are primarily classified as "Java Build" and "Front End Scaffolding" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Gradle are:

  • Declarative builds and build-by-convention
  • Language for dependency based programming
  • Structure your build

On the other hand, Yeoman provides the following key features:

  • Lightning-fast scaffolding — Easily scaffold new projects with customizable templates (e.g HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap), RequireJS and more.
  • Great build process — Not only do you get minification and concatenation
  • I also optimize all your image files, HTML, compile your CoffeeScript and Compass files, if you're using AMD, I will pass those modules through r.js so you don't have to.

"Flexibility" is the top reason why over 106 developers like Gradle, while over 119 developers mention "Lightning-fast scaffolding" as the leading cause for choosing Yeoman.

Gradle and Yeoman are both open source tools. It seems that Yeoman with 9.23K GitHub stars and 759 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Gradle with 9.23K GitHub stars and 2.7K GitHub forks.

Netflix, Lyft, and 9GAG are some of the popular companies that use Gradle, whereas Yeoman is used by Avocode, Webedia, and Edify. Gradle has a broader approval, being mentioned in 465 company stacks & 360 developers stacks; compared to Yeoman, which is listed in 205 company stacks and 200 developer stacks.

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Pros of Gradle
Pros of Yeoman
  • 110
    Flexibility
  • 51
    Easy to use
  • 47
    Groovy dsl
  • 22
    Slow build time
  • 10
    Crazy memory leaks
  • 8
    Fast incremental builds
  • 5
    Kotlin DSL
  • 1
    Windows Support
  • 121
    Lightning-fast scaffolding
  • 83
    Automation
  • 78
    Great build process
  • 57
    Open source
  • 49
    Yo
  • 8
    Unit Testing

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Cons of Gradle
Cons of Yeoman
  • 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
  • 1
    Even harder to debug than Javascript

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What is Gradle?

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.

What is Yeoman?

Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps. It is comprised of yo - a scaffolding tool using our generator system, grunt - a task runner for your build process and bower for dependency management.

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What companies use Gradle?
What companies use Yeoman?
See which teams inside your own company are using Gradle or Yeoman.
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What tools integrate with Gradle?
What tools integrate with Yeoman?

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What are some alternatives to Gradle and Yeoman?
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.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
Groovy
It is a powerful multi-faceted programming language for the JVM platform. It supports a spectrum of programming styles incorporating features from dynamic languages such as optional and duck typing, but also static compilation and static type checking at levels similar to or greater than Java through its extensible static type checker. It aims to greatly increase developer productivity with many powerful features but also a concise, familiar and easy to learn syntax.
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 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.
See all alternatives

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