When comparing Rake vs Gradle, the Slant community recommends Gradle for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source build systems for C/C++?” Gradle is ranked 11th while Rake is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Gradle is:
Android Studio's build system is an Android plugin for Gradle. What's more is that the Android Gradle plugin can be installed and run even on machines that don't have Android Studio, which enables you to build Android apps everywhere (for example continuous integration servers).
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Pros
Pro Powerful language
You can write code for your build system in Ruby. While not my choice for general programming, Ruby is powerful and expressive. Given some knowledge of Ruby, you can create powerful Rake extensions that result in your average target only needing a few lines in the rakefile in spite of having complex behaviors (Is the library for public consumption, or only for use within the current repo/tier? Compile certain files on certain platforms? Link to libraries published from other repos? etc.).
Pro Official Android Studio build tool
Android Studio's build system is an Android plugin for Gradle. What's more is that the Android Gradle plugin can be installed and run even on machines that don't have Android Studio, which enables you to build Android apps everywhere (for example continuous integration servers).
Pro Lots of plugins available
Gradle has hundreds of open source plugins available. This is extremely helpful for users who want to speed up their development.
Pro Dependency programming tool
Gradle is a dependency programming tool first and foremost. Gradle will make sure that all declared dependencies are properly executed for every random task that you execute in your setup. The code can be spread across many directories in any kind of file layout.
Pro Short scripts
Since Gradle does not use XML but it uses it's own DSL based on Groovy, Gradle scripts tend to be shorter than other build tools that use XML. Boilerplate code is also considerably small because it's DSL is designed to solve a specific problem: moving the software through its lifecycle starting from compilation into static analysis and testing, packaging and finally deployment.
Pro Integrates with Maven
Gradle can deploy to remote Maven repositories or even install to your local Maven repo.
Pro Built for continuous delivery
Gradle can be easily integrated with Jenkins to create a continuous delivery pipeline for any Java application.
Pro IDEA integration
Gradle has full integration with Jetbrains IDEA.
IDEA understands multi-module Gradle builds and automatically maintains the IDEA modules within the project.
You also have the option to run unit tests with either the built-in JUnit/TestNG test runner, or delegate running the test to Gradle using the same visualization as the built-in runner.
Pro Integration with Ant
Gradle integrates perfectly with Ant. Giving developers a lot of Ant's flexibility. You can run individual Ant tasks on Gradle or even entire Ant builds.
Pro Convention over configuration
Gradle follows the convention over configuration paradigm in order to make it easier for developers by having already made a number of decisions out of the box.
Pro Eclipse integration
Gradle has full integration with Eclipse through developer tools and plugins.
Cons
Con Slooooow
For large codebases or with complex extensions, Rake can become quite slow. I'm aware of one codebase on which it can take 15 minutes to determine that no changes have been made and no recompilation is necessary.
Con Can get slow for large builds
Since Gradle uses Groovy instead of XML for it's configuration scripts, it achieves a great deal of flexibility but unfortunately that comes with slower builds when the project gets large enough. This is because the entire Groovy script has to be recompiled for every build instead of simply being parsed.