+1 If you aren’t already using Maven, skip it. Gradle will also be somewhat of a “do it yourself” approach, but in the long run it will be easier to manage than Maven and worth learning.
You won’t get the same level of IDE support because Gradle build scripts are too easy to customize in ways that can’t easily be managed automatically. Editing the build.gradle file becomes your interface, but don’t worry for most cases it remains simple. It’s advantage comes when things really do get complicated, the issues are easier to address with Gradle than with Maven or Ant. Cheers, Scott > On Apr 23, 2020, at 1:59 PM, Laszlo Kishalmi <laszlo.kisha...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Telling the truth it ie easier to convert an Ant project to Gradle than Ant. > But there is no such a conversion tool yet. Probably won't be ever. > > > > On 4/23/20 10:57 AM, Ty Young wrote: >> >>> Anyway, is there any way currently or maybe in the future that can easily >>> convert Ant based projects to Maven? >>> >>> Start by creating a Maven project and then copy and paste the packages from >>> your Ant-based project to packages in your Maven-based project. >>> >>> That should get you very far. Though there are several specifics that >>> you'll need to learn about Maven (many resources available on-line), e.g., >>> images go in the 'resources' folder, and Maven projects in general are very >>> strictly structured. Good news: NetBeans has great support for Maven. >> >> I've made and converted other projects before, but this one is both JavaFX >> and is therefor the end-of-the-road with a several dependencies. Not >> impossible, but if there was a magic "convert project build system" it'd >> make such conversions easier. >> >> >> >> I have to disagree with the Maven support, at least when compared to Ant. >> Netbeans with Ant makes sure all build dependencies are up-to-date on >> build/run while Maven in Netbeans takes the "Do it yourself" approach. >> >> >> >> There is, I've noticed, an issue with filesystem jar detection in Netbeans. >> I've had my Ant based require the jar outputs of the several Maven projects. >> Problem is that if any of the projects have a build failure, Netbeans will >> correctly show an error that the dependency is missing but won't do the same >> on the next successful build. I have to do somekind of ritual including >> switching between files(module-info usually works), typing letters within >> them, and mashing ctrl + s in order for it to rescan and detect the jar >> files. >> >> >> >> Netbeans and Maven, for whatever reason, feels the need to reconfigure >> itself everytime a new JDK is used, even if it's the same version(15, for >> example) but different builds, resulting me having to wait 5 minutes to >> finish whatever it's trying to do. >> >> >> >> There is also the issues of Netbeans not showing build errors until you >> actually try to build if a project uses removed APIs, like I am with >> incubating modules, and a lack of clarity on what the difference is between >> "build" and "build with dependencies". I wish there was an IDE toggle for >> "always build with deps". >> >> >> >> TL;DR Maven support in Netbeans is either way worse than Ant or Maven just >> sucks. I wish I could still use Ant, it was truly a blissful experience >> compared to Maven, but there isn't any real cross-ide support nor do you >> have Maven central.
