This is a part of "Ant/Gradle/Maven comparison" series.

A common task during development is the creation of an installable version of software. The one I mention in this post is a real one - this is something I've been working working with since few months. It does few things related to Fuse ESB:

• unpacks Fuse sources,
• updates some config files,
• retrieves few JARs from Maven repository and put them into deploy folder,
• does some more file-related stuff - creates directories and copies files,
• produces ready-to-unpack-and-use file: tar.gz (for Linux) and zip (for Windows).

I started to write this with Ant/Maven, and then switched to Gradle. I'll present few code snippets here, that should give you a decent understanding of difference that Gradle makes. Please judge for yourself if the switch from Ant/Maven to Gradle was worth the effort.