At 11:04 25/3/01 +1000, Conor MacNeill wrote: >It is interesting to see you arguing strongly against the Commons project
Actually I was one of the original people who were arguing strongly for it in the begining. If you look across the library/ant/avalon/james lists you will I was arguing for many of the same features of commons. It was only later when they wanted centralized control rather than distributed control that I argued against it ;) >but you seem to be arguing for Ant to become like the Commons. partially. Thou I would argue for every project to embrace some of the features of commons ;) >I don't see Ant being some sort of library for other projects. I'm all for reuse but >perhaps the way to go would be to take those things from Ant into something >like the Commons as reusable bits. After all most tasks will be strongly >coupled into the Ant core and thus will require the ant.core to come along >as well. I don't see that at all. Almost all the ant tasks will access the ant engine/runtime whatever through a small interface (say 4-5 classes). The may rely on particular utility classes (maybe as many as 20). So all in all it will be a small bundle (say two small jars - one for taskapi and one for support util) plus any tasks that they want to use. >> Monolithic jars make it hard to pick and choose tasks to include in these >> sorts of environments. > >That isn't really true. You really think so? I disagree for two main reasons. * Perception * No forced separation of concerns Perception - Many people will not use avalon/turbine components because they perceive they have to use the whole framework to use the components regardless of whether or not this is the case. No forced separation of concerns - Break the jars up and you are forced to separate out the tasks so that there is not a mass of interwoven dependencies. It will soon be obvious (ie when jar 1 depends on jar 2 and vice versa) where you have too tight a coupling and need to do some work. We did that over at Avalon and it helped identify a lot of problems that were not obvious before hand. 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 | *-----------------------------------------------------*
