You can think of Gradle as goodness of Ant and Maven put together minus the noise of XML. And scriptability with groovy is very big plus.
- Gradle gives you conventions but still gives you power to override them easily.
- Gradle build files are less verbose as they are written in groovy.
- It provides very nice DSL for writing build tasks.
- Has lot of good plugins and vibrant ecosystem
When to use Gradle and When to use Maven ?
Almost everywhere for creating java/groovy project. The build files are much terse.
With Google choosing Gradle as the new build system for Android SDK and mature libraries like Spring, Hibernate, Grails, Groovy etc. already using it to power their builds, there is no doubt that Gradle is becoming de-facto build system for the Java ecosystem.
