What is included in JCenter repository in Gradle?

Question

From Gradle 1.7 there is new Public repository JCenter.

repositories {  
   jcenter()  
}

So I want to ask if all jars from Maven Central are parts of this repo? And if not from what is JCenter repo consists of? And is JCenter more reliable from Maven Central as downtime?

Answer 1

As mentioned in https://bintray.com/bintray/jcenter :

JCenter is the place to find and share popular Apache Maven packages for use by Maven, Gradle, Ivy, SBT, etc. For the most comprehensive collection of artifacts, point your Maven at: http://jcenter.bintray.com Want to distribute your own packages through JCenter? You can link your package by clicking the "Include My Package" button. And if you're into legacy, you can even synchronize your packages directly to Maven Central.

Also I find a good compare at https://www.jfrog.com/knowledge-base/why-should-i-use-jcenter-over-maven-central/

jcenter is the public repository hosted at bintray that is free to use for open source library publishers. There are many good reasons to use jcenter over Maven Central. Here are some of the major ones:

1. jcenter delivers library through CDN which means improvements in CI and developer builds.
2. jcenter is the largest Java Repository on earth. This means that whatever is available on Maven Central is available on jcenter as well.
3. It is incredibly easy to upload your own library to bintray. No need to sign them or do any complex things like you have to on Maven Central.
4. Friendly-UI If you want to upload your library to Maven Central you could do it easily with a single click on the bintray site.

Answer 2

Maven Central and JCenter are mostly equivalent, from a user perspective.

The reason there's 2 big repos is that Maven Central is backed by Sonatype, the company behind Maven and especially behind Nexus, a Maven repository they sell to enterprises.

JCenter is backed by JFrog, the company behind Artifactory, a competitor to Nexus. From what I remember JFrog also backed Gradle for a while, as a competitor to Maven.

So in the end it's about competing companies offering free services to try to lure customers to their higher level enterprise offerings.

Unless you have a very specific reason to use one of them, you can basically toss a coin to choose one.

Answer 3

jcenter() is similar to mavenCentral(). Have a look at https://bintray.com/bintray/jcenter for more details. The jCenter guys claim that they have a better performance than Maven Central.