Gradle

Written in Java and Groovy, Gradle Build Tool is a free and open-source build automation system designed to accelerate developer productivity. It can be used by teams for constructing mobile apps and microservices using Java, C++, Python or any other language, whether monorepo or multi-repo is preferred.

The builder comes equipped with a comprehensive API, plugins and integrations. For example, it can be integrated with Android Studio, Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans. It can be installed with a package manager, such as Scoop for Windows, MacPorts for macOS or SDKMAN! for Unix. Otherwise, you can set it up yourself by downloading the latest Gradle distribution and integrating it with your operating system as an environment variable.

There are two packages available for manual setup, whether you are looking only for the binaries only or are interested in the documentation and sources as well. After setting up Gradle as an environment variable, it can be called from a command-line interface to view the variable commands.

For example, you can ask the program to not rebuild project dependencies (-a, -no-rebuild), set the system property of the JVM (-D, --system-prop, such as -Dmyprop-myvalue), specify an initialization script (-I, --init-script) and point out to a task that will be excluded from execution (-x, --exclude-task).

It's possible to enable continuous building mode so that Gradle doesn't exit and re-executes tasks as soon as the file input changes (-t, -continuous), stop the Gradle Daemon if it's running (--stop), set the log level to worn (-w, -warn), as well as create a build scan, whether the tool shows a warning if the build scan plugin wasn't applied (--scan).

Taking into account the rich features provided by this app builder, Gradle is definitely worth looking into. We haven't had any trouble getting it up and running on Windows 10 in our tests using the latest JRE.