Why use Gradle instead of Ant or Maven? [closed] - java

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What does another build tool targeted at Java really get me?
If you use Gradle over another tool, why?


I don't use Gradle in anger myself (just a toy project so far) [author means they have used Gradle on only a toy project so far, not that Gradle is a toy project - see comments], but I'd say that the reasons one would consider using it would be because of the frustrations of Ant and Maven.
In my experience Ant is often write-only (yes I know it is possible to write beautifully modular, elegant builds, but the fact is most people don't). For any non-trivial projects it becomes mind-bending, and takes great care to ensure that complex builds are truly portable. Its imperative nature can lead to replication of configuration between builds (though macros can help here).
Maven takes the opposite approach and expects you to completely integrate with the Maven lifecycle. Experienced Ant users find this particularly jarring as Maven removes many of the freedoms you have in Ant. For example there's a Sonatype blog that enumerates many of the Maven criticisms and their responses.
The Maven plugin mechanism allows for very powerful build configurations, and the inheritance model means you can define a small set of parent POMs encapsulating your build configurations for the whole enterprise and individual projects can inherit those configurations, leaving them lightweight. Maven configuration is very verbose (though Maven 3 promises to address this), and if you want to do anything that is "not the Maven way" you have to write a plugin or use the hacky Ant integration. Note I happen to like writing Maven plugins but appreciate that many will object to the effort involved.
Gradle promises to hit the sweet spot between Ant and Maven. It uses Ivy's approach for dependency resolution. It allows for convention over configuration but also includes Ant tasks as first class citizens. It also wisely allows you to use existing Maven/Ivy repositories.
So if you've hit and got stuck with any of the Ant/Maven pain points, it is probably worth trying Gradle out, though in my opinion it remains to be seen if you wouldn't just be trading known problems for unknown ones. The proof of the pudding is in the eating though so I would reserve judgment until the product is a little more mature and others have ironed out any kinks (they call it bleeding edge for a reason). I'll still be using it in my toy projects though, It's always good to be aware of the options.


Gradle can be used for many purposes - it's a much better Swiss army knife than Ant - but it's specifically focused on multi-project builds.
First of all, Gradle is a dependency programming tool which also means it's a programming tool. With Gradle you can execute any random task in your setup and Gradle will make sure all declared dependecies are properly and timely executed. Your code can be spread across many directories in any kind of layout (tree, flat, scattered, ...).
Gradle has two distinct phases: evaluation and execution. Basically, during evaluation Gradle will look for and evaluate build scripts in the directories it is supposed to look. During execution Gradle will execute tasks which have been loaded during evaluation taking into account task inter-dependencies.
On top of these dependency programming features Gradle adds project and JAR dependency features by intergration with Apache Ivy. As you know Ivy is a much more powerful and much less opinionated dependency management tool than say Maven.
Gradle detects dependencies between projects and between projects and JARs. Gradle works with Maven repositories (download and upload) like the iBiblio one or your own repositories but also supports and other kind of repository infrastructure you might have.
In multi-project builds Gradle is both adaptable and adapts to the build's structure and architecture. You don't have to adapt your structure or architecture to your build tool as would be required with Maven.
Gradle tries very hard not to get in your way, an effort Maven almost never makes. Convention is good yet so is flexibility. Gradle gives you many more features than Maven does but most importantly in many cases Gradle will offer you a painless transition path away from Maven.


This may be a bit controversial, but Gradle doesn't hide the fact that it's a fully-fledged programming language.
Ant + ant-contrib is essentially a turing complete programming language that no one really wants to program in.
Maven tries to take the opposite approach of trying to be completely declarative and forcing you to write and compile a plugin if you need logic. It also imposes a project model that is completely inflexible. Gradle combines the best of all these tools:
It follows convention-over-configuration (ala Maven) but only to the extent you want it
It lets you write flexible custom tasks like in Ant
It provides multi-module project support that is superior to both Ant and Maven
It has a DSL that makes the 80% things easy and the 20% things possible (unlike other build tools that make the 80% easy, 10% possible and 10% effectively impossible).
Gradle is the most configurable and flexible build tool I have yet to use. It requires some investment up front to learn the DSL and concepts like configurations but if you need a no-nonsense and completely configurable JVM build tool it's hard to beat.


Gradle nicely combines both Ant and Maven, taking the best from both frameworks. Flexibility from Ant and convention over configuration, dependency management and plugins from Maven.
So if you want to have a standard java build, like in maven, but test task has to do some custom step it could look like below.
build.gradle:
apply plugin:'java'
task test{
doFirst{
ant.copy(toDir:'build/test-classes'){fileset dir:'src/test/extra-resources'}
}
doLast{
...
}
}
On top of that it uses groovy syntax which gives much more expression power then ant/maven's xml.
It is a superset of Ant - you can use all Ant tasks in gradle with nicer, groovy-like syntax, ie.
ant.copy(file:'a.txt', toDir:"xyz")
or
ant.with{
delete "x.txt"
mkdir "abc"
copy file:"a.txt", toDir: "abc"
}


We use Gradle and chose it over Maven and Ant. Ant gave us total flexibility, and Ivy gives better dependency management than Maven, but there isn't great support for multi-project builds. You end up doing a lot of coding to support multi-project builds. Also having some build-by-convention is nice and makes build scripts more concise. With Maven, it takes build by convention too far, and customizing your build process becomes a hack. Also, Maven promotes every project publishing an artifact. Sometimes you have a project split up into subprojects but you want all of the subprojects to be built and versioned together. Not really something Maven is designed for.
With Gradle you can have the flexibility of Ant and build by convention of Maven. For example, it is trivial to extend the conventional build lifecycle with your own task. And you aren't forced to use a convention if you don't want to. Groovy is much nicer to code than XML. In Gradle, you can define dependencies between projects on the local file system without the need to publish artifacts for each to a repository. Finally, Gradle uses Ivy, so it has excellent dependency management. The only real downside for me thus far is the lack of mature Eclipse integration, but the options for Maven aren't really much better.


This isn't my answer, but it definitely resonates with me. It's from ThoughtWorks' Technology Radar from October 2012:
Two things have caused fatigue with XML-based build tools like Ant and
Maven: too many angry pointy braces and the coarseness of plug-in
architectures. While syntax issues can be dealt with through
generation, plug-in architectures severely limit the ability for build
tools to grow gracefully as projects become more complex. We have come
to feel that plug-ins are the wrong level of abstraction, and prefer
language-based tools like Gradle and Rake instead, because they offer
finer-grained abstractions and more flexibility long term.


Gradle put the fun back into building/assembling software. I used ant to build software my entire career and I have always considered the actual "buildit" part of the dev work being a necessary evil. A few months back our company grew tired of not using a binary repo (aka checking in jars into the vcs) and I was given the task to investigate this. Started with ivy since it could be bolted on top of ant, didn't have much luck getting my built artifacts published like I wanted. I went for maven and hacked away with xml, worked splendid for some simple helper libs but I ran into serious problems trying to bundle applications ready for deploy. Hassled quite a while googling plugins and reading forums and wound up downloading trillions of support jars for various plugins which I had a hard time using. Finally I went for gradle (getting quite bitter at this point, and annoyed that "It shouldn't be THIS hard!")
But from day one my mood started to improve. I was getting somewhere. Took me like two hours to migrate my first ant module and the build file was basically nothing. Easily fitted one screen. The big "wow" was: build scripts in xml, how stupid is that? the fact that declaring one dependency takes ONE row is very appealing to me -> you can easily see all dependencies for a certain project on one page. From then on I been on a constant roll, for every problem I faced so far there is a simple and elegant solution. I think these are the reasons:
groovy is very intuitive for java developers
documentation is great to awesome
the flexibility is endless
Now I spend my days trying to think up new features to add to our build process. How sick is that?


It's also much easier to manage native builds. Ant and Maven are effectively Java-only. Some plugins exist for Maven that try to handle some native projects, but they don't do an effective job. Ant tasks can be written that compile native projects, but they are too complex and awkward.
We do Java with JNI and lots of other native bits. Gradle simplified our Ant mess considerably. When we started to introduce dependency management to the native projects it was messy. We got Maven to do it, but the equivalent Gradle code was a tiny fraction of what was needed in Maven, and people could read it and understand it without becoming Maven gurus.


I agree partly with Ed Staub. Gradle definitely is more powerful compared to maven and provides more flexibility long term.
After performing an evaluation to move from maven to gradle, we decided to stick to maven itself for two issues
we encountered with gradle ( speed is slower than maven, proxy was not working ) .

Related

Why use Yeoman's generators instead of Maven's archetypes?

I noticed that Yeoman's generators are more focused on client-side code generation, whereas Maven's archetypes are on server-side. But I still do not fully understand why it was necessary to create Yeoman, if Maven copes well with code generation task?
I suppose, it is possible to write a Maven's archetype, for example, for Angular JS, and use it instead of analogous popular Yeoman's generator. But there is no such archetype, or at least it is much less popular.
So, please tell me why?
My guess on this occasion turned out not true.
I thought that Maven is not able to generate components inside existing projects. But this is not true. I found that an optional <allowPartial>true</allowPartial> tag makes it possible to run the archetype:generate even on existing projects.
Thus without your help, I can not answer this question quickly.

Maven and Yeoman are both code generators using templates. It is up to template what code will be generated. Therefore both can be used to generate client-side and server-side projects.
Below points may explain why each tool is popular in one area, but not the other:
1. People are using tools that are popular inside their language ecosystem
One reason is that developers mostly use tools from ecosystem of language they are developing code in. Yeoman is code generator used mostly in client-side project, because that's where JavaScript is used most of the time. Maven is used mostly in server-side project, because that's where Java is used most of the time.
2. Tools from other environments needs that environment
Running Maven on purely JS project would demand installing Java to use it. Yeoman on the other hand can be run using Node.js. Java would be unnecessary dependency for developer. Vice versa is also true.

Is there a way to integrate Java/Groovy with Haskell using Gradle?

I usually work on projects based on Java/Groovy along with Gradle.
Now I would like to start introducing in these projects Haskell (at the beginning just as one-off spike scripts only). Initially I can manage them with Cabal but if its usage get more "integrated" with the remaining core base, I would like to be able to manage compiling/test/deployment phases with Gradle.
Is there any plugin/way to manage Haskell with Gradle? I am not talking about Frege (as the only solution I have found googling) but Haskell.

We've released a Gradle Haskell plugin last week which may be what you want. The announcement for the release can be found here.
We have been using it the last ~2 months for multiple Haskell projects successfully.

Ant standard tasks

Maven has a fairly standardized project structure and standard plugins for compilation and testing. Is there something widespread for Ant?
I found the following projects so far:
Antiplate
Ant Script Library
But I'm not sure whether these are widespread and are likely to be maintained in the future. Does someone have experience with them?

I know the guy who wrote Ant Script Library. He doesn't have any intention of stopping. To me, Ant's flexibility makes it hard for things like this to succeed. Ant-contrib only makes it worse IMHO as it allows people to break the model of the tool. Shame, as Ant is phenomenally powerful if you use it properly.

I have never heard of them. I've been on 2 significant Java projects lately. Our ant tasks were simple and home-grown. Each time someone starts a new project they make a copy of the ant file and mostly just change some constants at the top.

Small java project growing (maven and junit)

I'm working on a growing java project and I'm probably going to cooperate with somebody else to improve some features.
I'd like to use some tools to improve the quality of my work keeping in mind that:
I don't have too much time to spend on this project
it's a small project but it's really important for me
I don't want to buy software/hardware for it
I'm already using SVN
what do you think about maven and junit? is it worth spending time for them?
Do you know any other good tool?

Maven and JUnit are good for enforcing good habits (unit testing, uniform structure) and together with good SCM habits, I would say those are amongst the most important things for collaborative development.

Since you are not using JUnit my guess is you don't have any unit tests yet. This would seem to me the most important step for you to take, if other people will start working on your code. Without unit tests, someone can easily break functionality without knowing it.
Create a suite of unit tests that cover at least 80% of the code. You can use Cobertura to measure code coverage. This might seem like a lot of work (it is) but will save you far more time in the future.
Maven is the de-facto standard for building and deployment at the moment, but it has its drawbacks too. If you have a well documented build procedure in place (either using Ant or custom scripts) I would suggest it is less important to introduce Maven than to add unit tests.

JUnit is good for helping verify your code on any project.
Maven has a learning curve that can be hard to get over. If you have one module and a relatively simple set of build steps you may find it simpler to use Ant.
On the other hand with a Maven build you can simply add additional reports to your code to check various parameters on your code, and it is much harder to migrate to Maven than if you've conformed to its conventions from the start.
Examples of Maven plugins that can help check your code:
Findbugs (static analysis of possible bugs)
Checkstyle (enforce coding standards)
PMD (more static analysis)
PMD CPD (copy paste detection)
JDepend (cyclic dependency checking and package coupling)
Cobertura (code coverage)
If you're interested in the code quality plugins, also consider Sonar, it wraps these plugins up and gives you some funky reports.
If you're interested in best practice, also consider a Continuous Integration server, Hudson is free and integrates well with Maven.

We use Maven and JUnit on a fairly large project and find it very helpful.
For project planning, I highly recommend FogBugz. It's the best issue tracking system I have seen to date with good support for project management as well, and free for teams of up to 2 people.

If you use Eclipse and SVN I would recommend you to take a look at Mylyn. Its underlying concepts are very simple but it helps a lot when working on a team.
In my modest opinion, Maven is too annoying for the real benefit of it. Maybe ant is just enough for your deployment tasks.

I've used maven on one project and miss it. There is a fairly large upfront investment though in getting it setup and configured. The XML documentation was out of date when i was working with it (perhaps this has improved). Once you get past this initial setup though it's a wonderful time saver.
As for JUnit, it's great. Use it.
Both of these tools should be treated as an investment. At first it may seem like a lot of unrelated stuff, but the project will grow more predictably with less problems over the long haul.

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I'm a junior developer and recently started working for a very small office where they do a lot of in-house development. I have never worked in a project that involved more than one developer or were as big and complex as these ones.
The problem is that they don't use all the tools available (version control, automated building, continuous integration, etc) to their full extent: mainly a project is one big project in eclipse/netbeans using cvs for version control and everything checked in (including library jars), they started using branching for the first time when I started doing branches for small tasks and merging them back. As the projects get bigger and more complex, problems start to arise with dependencies, project structure tied to an IDE, building can be a PITA sometimes, etc. It's hectic at best.
What I want is to set up a development environment where most of these problems will go away and I will save time and effort. I would like to set up projects in a manner independent of IDE used using version control (I'm leaning towards SVN right now), avoid dependency messes and automate building as much as possible.
I know that there are multiple approaches and tools for this and do not want to see a holy war started, I would really appreciate practical recommendations based on experience and what you have found to be useful when facing similar problems. All projects are Java projects and range from web applications to "generic" ones, and I use Eclipse most of the time, but also use Netbeans if needed. Thanks in advance.

You seem to be almost exactly in the point where the place I worked at was when I started there 1,5 years ago, only difference being that you've started toying with branches which is actually something we still don't do at my work but more about that later on in this answer.
Anyway, you're listing a very good set of tools which can help a small company and those work really nicely as subtopics so without further ado,
Version control systems
Most commonly small companies currently use CVS or SVN and there's nothing bad in that, in fact I'd be really worried if no version control was really used at all. However you have to use version control right, just having one won't make your life easier. We currently use CVS and are looking into Mercurial, but we've found that the following works as a good set of conventions when working with CVS (and I'd suspect SVN too):
Have separate users for all commiters. It's beyond valuable to know who commited what.
Don't allow empty commit messages. In fact if possible, configure the repository to reject any commits without comments and/or default comment. Initial commit for FooBarizer is better than Empty log message
Use tags to mark milestones, prototypes, alphas, betas, release candidates and final versions. Don't use tags for experimental work or as footnotes/Post-It notes.
Don't use branches since they really don't work if you're continuing on developing the application. This is mainly because in CVS and SVN branching just doesn't work as expected and it becomes an exercise in futility to maintain any more than two living branches ( head and any secondary branch ) over time.
Always remember that for the software company the source code is your source of income and contains all your business value, so treat it that way. Also if you have extra 70 minutes, I really recommend that you watch through this talk Linus Thorvalds gave at Google about git and (d)VCS in general, it's really insightful.
Automated builds and Continuous Integration environments
These are about the same actually. Daily builds is a PR joke and has little no resemblance to the state of the actual software beyond some very rudimentary "Does it compile?" issues. You can compile a lot of awful code noise that doesn't do anything, keeping the software quality up has nothing to do with getting the code to compile.
On the other hand unit tests is a great way to maintain software quality and I can with a bit of personal pride say that rigorous unit testing helps even the worst of the programmers to improve a lot and catch stupid errors. In fact there has so far only been a total of three bugs that code I have written has reached production environments and I'd say that in 18 months that's a pretty damn good achievement. In our new production code we usually have a instruction code coverage of +80%, mostly +90% and in one special case reaching all the way to 98%. This part is very lively field and you're better of Googling for the following: TDD, BDD, unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests, xUnit, mock objects.
That's a bit of a lengthy preface, I know. The actual meat for all the above is this: If you want to have automated builds, have them occur every time someone commits and make sure there's a constantly increasing and improving amount of unit tests for production code. Have the continuous integration system of your choice (we use Hudson CI) run all the unit tests related to project and only accept builds if all the tests pass. Do not make any compromises! If unit tests show that the software is broken, fix the software.
Additionally, Continuous Integration systems aren't just for compiling code but instead they should be used for tracking the state of the software project's metrics. For Hudson CI I can recommend all these plugins:
Checkstyle - Checks if the actual source code is written in a way you define. Big part of writing maintainable code is to use common conventions.
Cobertura - Code coverage metrics, very useful to see how the coverage develops over time. Also keeping in line with the "source is God" mentality, allows you to discard builds if coverage falls below a certain level.
Task Scanner - Simple but sweet: Scans for specific tags such as BUG, TODO, NOTE etc. in your code and creates a list from them for everyone to read. Simple way to track short notes or known bugs which needs fixing or whatever you can come up with.
Project structure and Dependency Management
This is a controversial one. Basically everyone agrees that having an unified structure is great but since there's several camps with different requirements, habits and views to issue they tend to disagree. For example Maven people really believe that there's only one way - the Maven way - to do things and that's it while Ivy supporters believe that the project structure shouldn't be hammered down your throat by external parties, only the dependencies need to be managed properly and in an unified manner. Just that it's not left unclear, our company simply loves Ivy.
So since we don't use project structure imposed by external parties, I'm going to tell you a bit about how we got into what we got into our current project structure.
In the beginning we used individual projects for actual software and related tests (usually named Product and Product_TEST). This is very close to what you have, one huge directory for everything with the dependencies as JARs directly included in the directory. What we did was that we checked out both projects from CVS and then linked the actual project to the test software project in Eclipse as runtime dependency. A bit clunky but it worked.
We soon came to realize that these extra steps are completely useless since by using Ant - by the way, you can invoke Ant tasks directly in Hudson - we could tell the JAR/WAR building step to ignore everything by either file name (say, everything that ends with Test or TestCase) or by source folder. Pretty soon we converted our software project to use a simple structure two root folders, src and test. We haven't looked back ever since. The only debate we currently have is if we should allow for a third folder called spikes to exist in our standard project structure and that's not a very heated debate at all.
This has worked tremendously well and doesn't require any additional support or plugins from any of IDEs out there which is a great plus - number two reason we didn't choose Maven was seeing how M2Eclipse basically took over Eclipse. And since you must be wondering, number one reason for rejecting Maven was the clunkiness of Maven itself, endless amount of lengthy XML declarations for configuration and the related learning curve was considered a too big cost as to what we would get from using it.
Rather interestingly later on commiting to Ivy instead of Maven has allowed us to a smooth shift to do some Grails development which uses folder and class names as conventions for just about everything when structuring the web application.
Also a final note about Maven, while it claims to promote convention over configuration, if you don't want to do things exactly the way the Maven's structure says you should do things, you're in a world of pain for the aforementioned reasons. Certainly that's an expected side effect of having conventions but no convention shouldn't be final, there always has to be at least some room for changes, bending the rules or choosing the appropriate from a certain set.
In short, my opinion is that Maven is a bazooka, you work in a house and you ultimate goal is to have it bug free. Each of these are good on it's own and work even if you pick any two of them, but the three together just doesn't work.
Final words
As long as you have less than 10 code-centric people, you have all the flexibility needed to do the important decisions. When you go beyond that, you have to live with whatever choices you've made, no matter how good or bad they are. Don't just believe things you hear on the Internet, sit down and test everything rigorously - heck, our senior tech guy even wrote his bachelor's thesis about Java web frameworks just to figure out which one we should use - and really figure out what you really need. Don't commit to anything just because you may need some of the functionality it provides in distant future, pick those things that has the lowest possible negative impact to the whole company. Being the 10th person hired to the company I work at I can undersign everything in this paragraph with my own blood, we currently have 16+ people working and changing certain conventions would actually be a bit scary at this point.

Our development stack (team of 10+ developers)
Eclipse IDE with M2Eclipse and Subclipse/Subversive
Subversion for source control, some developers also use TortoiseSVN where Subclipse fails
Maven 2 for project configuration (dependencies, build plugins) and release mgmt (automatic tagging of releases)
Hudson for Continuous Integration (creates also snapshot releases with source attachments and reports)
Archiva for artifact repository (multiple repositories, e.g. releases and snapshots are separated)
Sonar for code quality tracking (e.g. hotspots, coverage, coding guidelines adherence)
JIRA for bug tracking
Confluence for developer wiki and communication of tech docs with other departments
Docbook for manuals (integrated into build)
JMeter for stress testing and long-term performance monitoring
Selenium/WebDriver for automated browser integration tests
Jetty, Tomcat, Weblogic and Websphere as test environments for web apps. Products are deployed every night and automated tests are run on distributed Hudsons.
Mailinglist with all developers for announcements, general info mails
Daily stand up meetings where everbody tells about what he's currently doing
This setup is considered standard for our company as many departments are using those tools and there is a lot of experience and community support for those.
You are absolutely right about trying to automate as much as possible. If your collegues start to see the benefits when aspects of the development phases are automated, they will be encouraged to improve on their own. Of course, every new technology gimmick ("tool") is a new burden and has to be managed and maintained. This is where the effort is moved. You save time e.g. when maven automatically performs your releases, but you will waste time on managing maven itself. My experience is that every time I introduced a new tool (one of the aboves), it takes time to be adopted and cared about, but in the end it will bring advantages to the whole team when real value is experienced - esp. in times of stress when the tools take over much of the work you would have to do manually.

A fine, admirable instinct. Kudos to you.
Part of your problem might not be solved using tools. I'd say that source code management needs some work, because it doesn't sound like branching, tagging, and merging is done properly. You'll need some training and communication to solve that.
I haven't used CVS myself, so I can't say how well it supports those practices. I will point out that Subversion and Git would be better choices. At worst, you should be reading the Subversion "red bean" book to get some generic advice on how to manage source code.
Personally, I'm not a Maven fan. I believe it's too heavyweight, especially when compared to Ant and Ivy. I'd say that using those with Cruise Control could be the solution to a lot of your problems.
You didn't mention unit testing. Start building TestNG and Fit tests into your build cycle.
Look into IntelliJ - I think its a better IDE than either Eclipse or NetBeans, but that's just me.
Best of luck.

Maven is great, however, it can have a fair bit of a learning curve, and it requires that the project fits a very specific file structure. If you have a big legacy project, it may be difficult to mavenize it. In that case, Ant+Ivy would do the same without the stringent requirements that maven has.
For build automation, Hudson is beyond awesome. I've used a couple different systems, but that is unquestionably the easiest to get set up and administer.

I recommend to use Maven for building your projects. Using Maven brigns value to the project, because:
Maven promotes convention over configuration what equals a good project structure
thanks Maven plugins eases generating projects for IDE's (Eclipse, Netbeans, Idea)
handles all dependecies and complete build lifecycle
faciliates projects modularization (via mulitimodule projects)
helps with releases/versions burden
improve code quality - easy integration with continous integration servers and lot of code quality plugins

Maven can be a bit daunting given its initial learning curve, but it would nicely address many of your concerns. I also recommend you take a look at Git for version control.

For project and repository management, I use trac with subversion.

Here's what i'm using right now, but i will probably switch a few parts (see the end of this post).
Eclipse as IDE with a few plugins : JADClipse (to decompile .class on the fly, pretty useful), DBViewer for a quick access to database through Eclipse, WTP (Web Tools Platform) integrated into Eclipse for running Tomcat 6 as a developement web server (pretty fast), Mylyn (linked with JIRA bug-tracker).
I'm too wondering about "IDE independant projects", right now we are all sticked on Eclipse - Eclipse project files (.project, .classpath, .settings) are even commited in the CVS repository (in order to have a project fully ready once checked out) - but with Netbeans, supported by Sun and running faster and faster with each release (and each new JRE version), the question isn't closed.
CVS for storing projects, with nearly no branches (only for patches).
I'm working on environment production with Oracle SGBDR but I'm using HSQLDB on my developement computer to make test and build and development process way faster (with the help of the open-source DDLUtils tool to ease database creation and data injections). Otherwise i use SQLWorkbench for quick BD tasks (including schemas comparison) or the Oracle (free) SQLDeveloper for some Oracle specific tasks (like investating sessions locks and so on).
Tests are only JUnit tests (either simple unit test cases or more complex test cases (nearly "integrations" ones), nearly always runing on HSQLDB to run faster.
My build system is Ant (launched from Eclipse) for various small tasks (uploading a war on a remote server for example) and (mainly) Maven 2 for :
the build process
the publishing of the released artefacts
the publishing of the project's web site (including reports)
launching tests campaigns (launched every night)
The continuous integration front-end is Luntbuild, and the front-end for the Maven repository is Archiva.
All this works. But I'm pretty disappointed by a few elements of this ecosystem.
Mainly Maven, it's just too time-consuming and i have a lot of griefs versus this tool. Conflicts dependencies resolution is a joke. Lot of XML lines in every POM.xml, redundant in every project (even with the help of a few POM roots). Plugins are way too inconsistent, buggy, and it's really difficult to find clear documentation explaining what has to be configured, and so on.
So i'm wondering about switching from Maven to ANT+Ivy. For what i've seen so far, it's seems pretty cool (there are various Conflict manager for the conflicts dependencies resolutions and you can even write your own conflict manager), there is no need to have an additionnal tool installed and configured (as ANT is running natively under Eclipse, whereas Maven needs a separate plugin - i've tried the 3 Mavens plugins by the way, and have found all the three of them buggy).
However Maven 3 is on its way, i'll give it a try but i don't expect it to be fundamentaly different from Maven 2.
Hudson would seem a better choice than Luntbuild, too, but this part won't be changed for the now.
And Subversion will probably replace CVS in a near future (even if i nearly don't have any trouble with CVS).

Lots of good advice here. I have just a few additions:
I think that, unlike the rest, an IDE is a personal tool, and each developer should have some freedom to select the one that works best for him. (For example, many love Eclipse, while I ditched it for NetBeans because Maven integration was, uh, problematic in Eclipse.)
I thought I was going to hate Maven, but now I get along with it fairly well. The main problem I have these days is finding out where the conventions are documented.
I would advise introducing tools one at a time. If you try to mechanize all aspects of software development at a by-hand shop in one stroke, there will likely be massive resistance. Make your business case and get agreement on one good common tool, or just get permission to set it up for your use but in a commonly-accessible way and let people see what it does for you. After a few of these, people will develop a habit of wondering how aspect X could be automated, so additional tools should be easier to introduce.

The single most best thing you can do without disrupting other people and their way of working is setting up hudson to watch the CVS repository for each of your project. Just doing that will give a central place to see cvs commit messages.
Next step is getting these projects to compile under Hudson. For Eclipse this typically means either switching to ant or - as we did - use ant4eclipse to model the existing eclipse build process. Not easy but very worthwhile. Remember to send out mails when the build breaks - this is extremely important. Ant4eclipse requires team project sets - introducing them in your organization Will make your colleagues happy the next time they need to set up a fresh workspace.
When you have a situation where your stuff builds properly whenever somebody commits changes then consider making that automatically built code the code to actually go to the customer. As it was built on the build server and not on a developers machine, you know that you can reproduce the build. That is invaluable in a "hey fix this ancient version" situation.

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