Gradle is one of the latest tools for Java developers to create build scripts and manage dependencies. It's a good alternative to Maven and the best thing about Gradle is that finally, you have a much more readable, and concise build scripts. With Maven, build scripts are written using XML in pom.xml file which is very verbose, but with Gradle, build scripts are written using Groovy which is very concise by design. This means the same 100 line Maven build script can be replaced by 10 to 20 lines of Gradle script. To give you an exam, here is a diagram that compares a Gradle script to a Maven pom.xml file.