The main purpose of this paper was to analyze and review the three identified build automation tools. The team found out that while Gradle and Maven are almost similar in building projects along with their dependencies, Bazel follows a markedly different approaches. Again, Gradle gives best results in terms of performance while Maven leads in user experience.
Maven focus on developing a project within the deadline whereas Gradle develops the application by adding functionalities. Gradle has many advanced CLI features for effective build automation. Bazel supports IntelliJ IDEA(Java IDE) that works properly in MAC and is not supported in windows. With reference to APIs, Maven and Gradle are good at providing flexible plugin provisions with the other IDEs and have created a benchmark for plugin user-facilities to a large extent. Maven provides overriding dependencies based on the version that too only on a single set of dependencies. Whereas Gradle and Bazel both supports similar dependency management flow but Gradle has more advanced features and capabilities in dependency management.
Based on this comparison we can conclude that both Bazel and Gradle are faster than Maven. The studies suggest that Gradle is better than Bazel for most of the projects. Even if we take a million lines of code, Gradle performance is fast and reliable than both Bazel and Maven.
However, it is difficult when it comes to choose a tool for project development, when all the tools have their own advantages and disadvantages. We can consider Maven while working on a small project where modularization, consistency and lots of plugins are required. Gradle is best suited for large projects, where the focus is on flexibility, speed, ease of use and integration builds. Bazel is designed purely to handle very large projects. Projects started in Maven, at any phase can be easily ported to Gradle, and vice versa. Gradle can handle all the projects with utmost flexibility and speed. It also supports porting between the tools in minimum steps. Hence, Gradle can be considered as the most preferred automation tool in recent times.
The team also notes that future exposure should critically look at the break down of existing plugins in Gradle, as this is leading to unexpected changes in build operation causing a lot of restrictions in usage of functionalities. This can also work on the complex dependency trees in Maven to minimize the disputes within dependencies, resulting in better outcomes.