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On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked by various hip developers if there was a conversion script for transforming existing Ant build files into Gant build files. Russel Winder, the copasetic guru behind Gant updated the Gant website with a link to a trippin’ script (dubbed ant2gant.groovy) that’ll do just that, baby!

I tested it out with a normal Ant build file and it worked like a charm– just make sure you have in your classpath:

• ant.jar (I used 1.7.0)
• ant-launcher.jar (I used 1.7.0 as well)
• commons-cli.jar (I used 1.1)

Also too, my Ant build.xml file had a path element living outside of a target like so:

<path id="build.classpath">
 <fileset dir="lib">
  <include name="**/*.jar"/>
 </fileset>
</path>

This was causing the script (really Ant’s Project object) to blow up; consequently, I moved it into an initializing target and things worked copasetically from there.

If you haven’t tried Gant yet and you find yourself beating your head against the wall when it comes to adding behavior to Ant (such as looping, etc), then give your head a rest and take a look at Gant– this is a smokin’ tool that adds a refreshing level of flexibility and expressiveness to Ant (using Groovy, man!).

Well, well. Looks what’s back, baby!

• JBehave 2, naming tests and developing libraries with BDD- JBehave lives! It’s copasetic to see they’re working on another release– I think it is a good move to leverage JUnit; however, I wonder if 2.0’s features will be compelling enough to use.
• Easy Does It With easyb- Speaking of JBehave and BDD, Andrew Binstock seems to appreciate easyb and its leveraging of a hip customer-oriented DSL.
• Saving the day with BDD- Customer-oriented thinking in action, baby.
• Ant Best Practices: Provide a clean target- the build doctor has a prescription for you, man.
• Infinitest v3 Released!- If you haven’t seen my friend Ben’s Infinitest yet, you should really take a look!
• Is Agile at a standstill?- If you want to have a lot of fun, ask some Agile-ists to define what Agile means…
• Problem trends with PMDReports- Trending metrics? Why would anyone want to do that, man? Seriously though, PMDReports looks great!

The hip folks over at easyb.org have released version 0.8 of easyb. If you haven’t seen easyb yet, then you are in a for a real treat as easyb is the coolest thing since sliced bread, baby. As a BDD framework for the Java platform, easyb makes it super easy to craft executable documentation for software requirements by leveraging a flexible (and easy) story based domain specific language.

What’s particularly copasetic about the 0.8 release is the inclusion of a new IntelliJ plug-in, which makes working with easyb, well, even easier (if that’s possible, man). Many thanks to Rod Coffin for his hard work on this and the Maven 2 plug-in!

The DSL has been refined slightly to permit adding a description phrase (way to go Rodrigo Urubatan!); plus, because it’s everyone’s bag, you can chain phrases via and now– the DSL now permits a second repeated phrase substitute and instead as follows:

scenario "text",{
 given "text", {}
 and "given text", {}
 when "text", {}
 then "text", {}
 and "then text", {}
}

Abstract stories are now possible; thus, the proceeding closure to any phrase is now optional– easyb will make the story as pending. Kudos to Ken Brooks for this and the vast reporting improvements!

Other noteworthy changes:

• HTML story report generation via the Maven 2 plugin
• Groovy 1.5.4 compatible
• Numerous reporting improvements
• shouldNotHave
• bug fixes like exception catching
• naming clarifications

If you haven’t had a chance to check out easyb, then start lookin’ baby! See the mailing list or be a copasetic disco dancer and just download it!