At 01:28 15/1/01 -0500, Rosen, Alex wrote: >[Switching over to ant-dev again...] > >Peter Donald wrote: >> Nope ants build.xml format is a declarative form for >> describing a build process. > >One might even say a build "procedure" :)
right ;) >As I said before, I'm not wild about the idea of inventing our own >mini-scripting language. But I think Jason's system would be *by far* the >easiest to understand and use. Maybe I'm naive, and haven't thought things >through, but to me this would be a joy to use, whereas using XSLT would be a >confusing mess. I guess that's somewhat of an exageration - I'm sure once I got >my head around it, it wouldn't be too hard to use. But I think it would require >me to go "huh?" a lot. it does that for complex stuff but for easier stuff there should be less "huh?" I think thou I have been using it for ages so I may have forgotten what it was like to learn ;) >When I first tried using Ant, I found it intuitive, and a joy to use. Then I >ran in to some of the limitations of the current Ant model, mostly related to >code/data/whatever reuse, and I came to see that Ant was intuitive because it >was overly simplified. It was great for the easy case, but not the hard case. >If we can solve the hard case and still keep it intuitive, I think that would >be fabulous. Maybe adding more scripting to the Ant file is another seductive >but ultimately unsuccessful idea. But I'd like to try that road first. Well thats where I differ I guess. Once we add support for X - no matter how good or how bad X is we are likely to have to support it. We still have a whole bunch of bad design choices in Ant1.x (can you say magic properties ;-]) that we have to continue supporting. If we add if/while/case statements then they can *never* be removed (until Ant3.x). However experiments with XSLT is easy to remove as it does not change the format of build.xml file. It is a preprocess stage. >I don't >think that anyone will think that an Ant that requires XSLT to do anything of >even medium complexity will ever be a joy to use. I do a lot of things quite easily of medium size - many of the projects at Apache are of medium size or bigger and they get away with it. Using XSLT will always be a tradeoff of reuse vs complexity of reuse. >Pete, I haven't quite figured out your take on XSLT for build files. Do you >think it's intuitive, or does it just suck less than the alternatives? Well I don't much like XSLT but I think it sucks less than the alternatives ;) We can also back out in the future or use CSS instead if we find it was the wrong choice with minimal hubub. I am loathed to complicate the base Ant format unless we absolutely have to. >Does anyone have any experience with IBM's Bean Markup Language and/or Bean >Scripting Framework? Could they be useful here? BML is great and we actually use BSF in script task ;) However I am not sure BML is appropriate here - while some aspects of it has made their way into my proposal (separation between convertion aspect and data-container/data-parser aspects) - I am not sure which other aspects would be useful. >P.S. Pete, sorry for making you fight "battles" :) on two simultaneous fronts. ;) Cheers, Pete *-----------------------------------------------------* | "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, | | and proving that there is no need to do so - almost | | everyone gets busy on the proof." | | - John Kenneth Galbraith | *-----------------------------------------------------*
