Kotlin developers on the JVM often use ordinary build tools that are used generally in the JVM world and Java especially. Two popular build tools that Kotlin developers use are Gradle from Gradle Inc. and Maven by the Apache Software Foundation. Both Gradle and Maven can both manage dependencies and build projects. As we have already covered Gradle back in Chapter 4, Java Programming, when we developed a small Java application, we will use Apache Maven in this chapter.

Maven is a build tool that uses a XML build file for building a project. Maven closely follows the convention over configuration paradigm. If you can follow its conventions, you won't need to alter the build file too often, but things can get quite complex (or even immensely problematic) once you need to break free and need custom actions when building your project. For most popular actions plugins...