Evaluate Gradle

[bashir2]

There are at least two aspects of the build that might be improved by using Gradle:

• Speed, in particular incremental build speed is supposed to be much faster with Gradle. It seems a significant amount of time is currently spent in building the uber-jar for the batch pipeline which is probably not going to be improved significantly by Gradle.
• Python: In our Maven config currently we ignore Python code under dwh and synthea-hiv modules. It would be nice to run "builds" for those (e.g., installing deps in a virtual-env then running static analysis, code formatting, and unit-tests) as part of a single build command.

The advantage (or maybe disadvantage, depending on POV) of Maven is that for Java projects it imposes a strict structure which is very familiar to most Java developers hence making it easy to start and contribute to the project. We should try to minimize custom build logic if we switch to Gradle.