One of my build has failed like that :

gradle compileJ
:processResources UP-TO-DATE
:compileJava

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

• Where:
  Build file '/Users/shameemah/Workspaces/SkaffoldWebsiteSpring/Data/build.gradle' line: 151

• What went wrong:
  Execution failed for task ':compileJava'.
  > Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':compile'.
  > Artifact 'javax.transaction:jta:1.1@jar' not found.

• Try:
  Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

Total time: 5.462 secs

One of my other project is built with maven and has also the dependency javax.transaction:jta:1.1. This project has failed because of an other dependency problem (not with javax.transaction:jta:1.1). So I guess what happened is that maven has downloaded the pom for javax.transaction:jta:1.1 but not the jar. My gradle project also use the maven local repo.
My hypothesis is that if gradle find the pom in the maven repo but not the jar, it fails and won't try to get the jar from any other source.

After clearing my maven cache, the problem has gone...