+1 for buildr. It admittedly takes awhile to learn the DSL, but it seems like all of these DSL build tools take awhile to learn.

(I think that was one really nice thing about Ant--you could scan their manual/list of tasks and understand it very quickly.)

It seems a little odd using Ruby to build Java projects, but ironically I actually prefer that over Groovy.

This is horrible for me to say, but I'd like Groovy to gracefully go away--it lost the Java.next race (they were stubborn about dynamic typing for way too long) and I feel the only reason it's still around are for the admittedly nice frameworks it sprouted: Grails and Gradle.

The language itself is "meh", IMO.

...although it bothers me to no end that a dynamic language like Groovy had compile-time AST translation way before other (similarly mainstream) static languages like Scala.

Anyway. Gradle's momentum is impressive. Perhaps I can unlearn my Groovy bias.