Build tools such as Maven and Ivy scores over ANT as they have dependency management support. There are even open source hosted binaries on sites like Maven Central, so that you don’t have to download all the required dependencies yourself, but can just ask the build tool to get it for you. For simple Hello World programs, you might not require any other libraries, but an enterprise project will have lot of dependencies to other libraries. For instance a Spring or hibernate program will have dependencies on their framework jars.

One of the features of Gradle that I like the most is its ability to interoperate with other popular build tools such as ANT and MAVEN. We have already seen using Gradle with ANT and here we will see using Gradle with MAVEN. We are not going to discuss the advantages of one over the other, but only how to use both of them together. One of the best things about Maven is that it adds more conventions than in Maven so that you can create build script files with much lesser code than in Maven.

Prerequisites

1. You need to install, configure and get familiar with gradle as outlined in the previous note. 

2. Gradle 1.x requires a Java JDK 5 or higher to be installed and the location needs to be added to an environment variable JAVA_HOME. 

3. Gradle 2.x requires a Java JDK 6 or higher to be installed and the location needs to be added to an environment variable JAVA_HOME. 

To create eclipse plugins, you need an eclipse distribution package with Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment like Eclipse Standard or Eclipse IDE for Java EE. I am using Eclipse Standard 4.3.2. Always try to use the latest version of the distribution available. You can start exploring from eclipse site at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads to check the package contents of the distribution package.