A jar-with-dependencies is not really working with the grain of maven - you're meant to use the "exploded" version and use maven to run with the right classpath. Caching and reusing build outputs sounds clever, but my experience with Gradle is that the cache wastes far more time than it ever saves, either by taking longer to search the cache than to rebuild the thing, or by causing nondeterministic misbuilds that take days to debug.