What is "gradle"

Gradle is an open source build automation system that builds upon the concepts of Apache Ant and Apache Maven and introduces a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL) instead of the XML form used by Apache Maven of declaring the project configuration. Gradle uses a directed acyclic graph ("DAG") to determine the order in which tasks can be run.

Gradle was designed for multi-project builds which can grow to be quite large, and supports incremental builds by intelligently determining which parts of the build tree are up-to-date, so that any task dependent upon those parts will not need to be re-executed.

The initial plugins are primarily focused around Java, Groovy and Scala development and deployment, but more languages and project workflows are on the roadmap.