I don’t get why would anyone want to use tools like Gradle or Maven, I mean what do they even do? I tried to understand and use them but that got me no where they just unnecessarily complicate things and create a lot of what seems to be absolutely useless files.
So, why bother at all and use these tools and what are they good for?
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Answer
First of all Gradle and Maven are great tools for managing your dependencies and also giving you the option to simplify your build process. Without these tools you would have to manually download *.jar files. And copy them somewhere in your project folder.
And if you want to update, you would have to open the website again, download it and replace your existing JAR.
Quite often JARs themself have dependencies, so you would have to manually download them as well.
I can understand that the setup of Maven / Gradle at first can be time consuming, but it’s usually worth the time since you just have to declare: I need package com.example.package in version 1.2.3 and you just have to run a simple install command and they will take care of downloading everything needed.
Secondly, you can declare commands describing how to run your tests and they will usually take care of your tests not getting mixed up with your final and compiled package.
Also this is good for collaboration because once this config is shared, every developer can use it without going much of a hassle of configuring your development environment. Another good point is that it is independent of any IDE, so your project is not an IntelliJ or Eclipse project and everyone can use the IDE/editor they prefer.
Basically the idea is: You configure it once and then you can enjoy the automatism.
However, if your project is really small and relying on only a few dependencies you might not need it.