Ant ????? Java™ ????????????????????????? XML ??????????????????????? ?????? ????????????? Ruby ??…

Ant Script Samples

On the site, you will find other information pertaining to building large-scale java applications, as well as other helpful hard-to-find common configurations.

I feel that the main build issues are these:

1. Standard naming
2. Versioning
3. Historical builds
4. ClassLoading
5. Simple plugins
6. Real language support (i.e. Ruby or Java or Groovy)
7. Flexibility

Savant solves all of these except #5, but I’m working on that You can define plugins in any language. Plugins are versioned fully and plugin dependencies are managed. Savant handles class loaders so that two plugins can use the same JAR of different versions. It provides standard naming conventions since it uses plugins. And unlike Maven it is much more flexible. You can override, extend and change plugins. You can produce multiple JAR files and pretty much do whatever you can dream up. You can target specific compilers rather than the JDK running the build. You can unit test effectively. It has a ton of other great features as well.

Now, Savant 2.0 has been in development for a long time and really needs some help. Anyone interested in a building out a great tool for building software, left me know. I’m hoping to have a beta and a final release of 2.0 sometime this year. The more folks that want to help out the faster it will come along.

1. Things that we use _all the time_ tend to resist change. For example, in natural language, the verbs “to be” and “to have” are notoriously weird because they aren’t made “regular”, as is the tendency with less-used verbs.

Similarly, build tools have amazing resilience. The industry suffered with ‘make’ for decades. The fact that Ant saved us from ‘make’ is enough for it to go into the Hall of Fame.

2. Maven has some really neat ideas but IMHO the execution was shoddy. V 1.x proved the folly of XML as a scripting language (was Jelly the tool?), but also that poor documentation outweighs a Grand Scheme (the POM).

3. I have not used Rake. I am intrigued by Gant because it builds on top of Ant and gets around some of the awkwardness of XML as a scripting syntax. My hope is that Gant learns from Maven and nails the documentation aspect. (Maybe it has — I don’t know)

4. I think the big question is, man: is anyone using anything other than Ant or Maven? Anyone using Gant/Rake/etc?

If you look at the composite build process as a whole there are obviously other functions around the language specific process, for example creating a new workspace out of source control, baselining, labeling, deploying etc. I still believe people will want to “script” up this composite process, however most of these are not implementation specific and could be executed in any scripting language. So maybe we should just see Ant as a generated code, necessary for the build process but look for the best, richer, non DSL - there are candidates out there it just needs people brave enough to adopt them.

Imagine persuading a Ruby developer to write their build in Smalltalk or Lisp. Similarly, there’ll be resistance when suggesting that a Java developer should write their build in Groovy or Ruby. Perhaps some would do it as an experiment to see what those languages are like, but other than that, ant works, so ant’s what will be used until something better turns up, and ‘better’ includes the learning curve.