Hi, There has been a lot of discussion about the input format of tasks, how we do templating, do we use CSS for user prefs. Without a doubt there is members of the community who want to use velocity and other members who want to use XSLT and still yet others who want to use a new custom language. User preferences has also not been fully decided so it could be properties, CSS, XML or something we haven't though about yet.
All in all I can not see how we can bind to a particular format or builder just yet. Thus I propose that we use a ProjectBuilder abstraction. A ProjectBuilder is responsible for taking a number of parameters and a URL/file/resource location and building a project instance. How it does it is irrelevent to the Ant runtime - just as long as it does it. Using this type of strategy we can allow experimentation with xslt/velocity/xsp/siLLy etc and it makes no difference to the engine. Later on in development process we can choose to "standardize" on one format if ant-dev desires but until then let let chaos reign and see what comes out of it ;) Hopefully something good. If you look further at the myrmidon proposal you will also notice there is a difference between input stream and sax stream as leads into Project builder. In theory you could "stack" stream handlers together and higher-level handlers (like SAX) as well. For instance you could extract a stream from a url, un-gzip it, transform it using XSLT+SAX and then the final builder. All these options will be possible but are not defined for the moment. (And may never be implemented). "stacking" is something that is a fairly common strategy, jdk does it with difference between URLProtocolHandlers and URLContentHandlers, most OSes have stacked filesystems (for compression/encryption/other). Anyways - this is a powerful mechanism and wil allow experimentation as appropriate - we can decide later on how the default ant behaves. Remembering that I am not asking for stackable stuff just yet - merely a ProjectBuilder abstraction, thoughts/votes? 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 | *-----------------------------------------------------*
