
While predominantly used for Java projects, you can use it for Scala, Ruby, and C#, as well as a host of other languages. Maven will download libraries and plugins from the different repositories and then puts them all in a cache on your local machine. There are pre-defined targets for tasks such as packaging and compiling. It uses an XML file to describe the project that you are building, the dependencies of the software with regards to third-party modules and parts, the build order, as well as the needed plugins. It helps you map out how a particular software is built, as well as its different dependencies. Maven is used for project build automation using Java. It supports development and subsequent deployment using Java, Scala, and Groovy, with other project workflows and languages being introduced in the future. For now, the latest stable release is version 3.4, which was launched in February 2017. Tasks that are dependent on updated parts are no longer re-executed. It also allows for incrementally adding to your build, because it knows which parts of your project are updated. It was designed to support multi-project builds that are expected to be quite huge.

Several developers created Gradle and first released in 2007, and in 2013, it was adopted by Google as the build system for Android projects.

It also determines the order of tasks run by using a directed acyclic graph. It uses domain-specific language based on the programming language Groovy, differentiating it from Apache Maven, which uses XML for its project configuration. Gradle is a build automation system that is fully open source and uses the concepts you see on Apache Maven and Apache Ant.
