I’ve used Ant, Maven, and Gradle across different projects, and what stands out to me is how differently they approach the same problem.

They can all build software, but they make very different assumptions about how much control the developer should have and how much the build system should handle automatically.

Ant—explicit and flexible

Ant was the first build system I worked with, and probably the one I find easiest to understand.

You define targets, dependencies between those targets, and the individual tasks that make up the build. If you want to compile Java, package files, copy resources, run another program, or deploy something, you explicitly define how it should happen.

That makes Ant extremely flexible.

I’ve used it for more than Java builds. For example, I use Ant to prepare builds of my own website, compile SCSS, package files, and deploy the result to a server using custom macros.

The downside is that you are responsible for nearly everything.…