Before moving to learn spring should need to know about Gradle and Maven? [closed]

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Closed 5 years ago.

I'm currently new in Java EE but good handling at core Java, and knows much about Servlet, JSP(little bit), Now planning to learn about Spring Framework, and i don't know anything about Gradle and Maven honestly, so do I need to know about dependencies? i mean what's the use of them before moving to Spring? thanks in advanced,

Help Would be appreciated!

Answer 1

They're all build tools, when you have small programs, adding dependencies and running regression tests are fairly straight forward. However as you start to have large prjects with complex hierarchies, using tools such as Makefiles or simple build scripts become very hard to maintain.

Don't worry, learning mavin takes < 1 day; gradle can get a bit complicated, but if you're just starting out, there's ample resources online.

I found this resource pretty indispensable when learning about gradle.

Answer 2

Personal experience, no.

You learn gradle/maven depending on which you use to build with.

If you get into Spring Framework you will pick it up along the way.

Answer 3

Gradle or Maven are build frameworks. They simplify and automate the job of collecting all your third party dependencies and packaging the complete application. You can get exactly the same results by creating a shell script or some other build tool.

Spring on the other hand is a framework which is used for specific functionality, but not for builds. The two things are completely separate.

Spring can even be used directly by downloading the .jar and manually adding it to your classpath. IDEs like Eclipse will help with this. Many projects still do this - they have a custom build framework instead of Maven, etc.

In short, learning Gradle/Maven is not required for using Spring. You should still learn them anyway, because they are widely used standards. However, there is no dependency and both can be learned separately.

Answer 4

Start with Maven and then jump to Spring. Maven has a concept called archetypes which will help create bare minimal Spring projects. The list of archetypes is published in the Maven site. Also when you want to learn spring you will need to work with dependencies between different components. So start with Maven basics and then jump into Spring otherwise you will have a constant struggle with the spring library and its dependencies.

Gradle is an elegant build system for working with large projects and is a better maven.