Maven is declaritive. IMO it's the best of the Java build tools. Gradle is not declaritive, unless it's changed since the last time I looked at it.
Maven has problems. It's not perfect by any means. I would love to see it rewritten, get rid of the verbose XML which makes viewing dependencies hard and fix the craziness around generated code.
Honestly, I'm tempted to make a fork of Cargo for Java, it's nearly perfect. But this goes against my opinion that build tools should be in the same language as the code they build.
Maven has problems. It's not perfect by any means. I would love to see it rewritten, get rid of the verbose XML which makes viewing dependencies hard and fix the craziness around generated code.
Honestly, I'm tempted to make a fork of Cargo for Java, it's nearly perfect. But this goes against my opinion that build tools should be in the same language as the code they build.