We made a fairly significant change to Spring Boot in 2.3.0.M1. It was the first release of the project to be built with Gradle rather than Maven. A thread on Twitter about the migration had a number of people asking why we switched and the benefits, if any, that we’d seen. This blog post aims to answer those questions.
Each project in the Spring portfolio is run in a fairly autonomous manner. We strive for consistency where our users will see it most – API design, for example – but choose the tools that best meet the needs of the project for things that are less visible. One example of this is the build system. A change to the build system affects those that contribute to the project but, if we get things right, it has no effect on users. This has led to a mixture of Maven- and Gradle-based builds. For example, Spring Framework has been built with Gradle since 3.2.0.M1 in 2012, whereas Spring Boot began a year later and Spring Cloud shortly after that, both with Maven-based builds. Unlike Spring Boot, Spring Cloud has no plans to switch as Maven continues to meet their needs. In short, if you take only one thing from this blog post it’s that you should choose whatever tool best meets your project’s needs.
