MAGIC - Magic Ain't Gonna Interest Critics Magic is an experimental build system that I have been working on for a couple of days.
What is it? =========== Magic is a generic build system, influenced by both the good parts as well as the bad parts of Maven; - Plugins are good. - Standard build layouts are good. - Downloadable artifacts are good. - Automatic dependency resolution is good. - Scripting can(!) be convenient. - preGoal/postGoal can be useful. - Ant is an incredible collection of well-tested code. - XML is not for programming language syntax. - Why do I need to know another programming language than Java? - XML is slow to parse. - Don't mix Ant XML with other XML. Once Magic is built and 'installed', it is a command-line utility which is invoked with the command 'magic'. Magic is small. The engine Jar file is <20k. Magic is fast. Practically no overhead at all. Most processing on-demand only. Magic uses partial Avalon Framework for the scripts, namely Contextualizable, LogEnabled, Serviceable and Initializable. Magic leverages the BeanShell scripting interpreter (which is also fairly small ~150k). Magic can build and install BeanShell script plugins, which makes up the complete build system. Currently, I have created; plugin, prepare, artifact, java, jar and xdoc plugins. Magic allows the programmer to add their own build.bsh scripts at each project for specialized processing. Magic has a properties file chain, for multi-level overrides. Magic knows about projects sharing a common higher level system, so called "Project System". Magic has a powerful and flexible, yet simple, notification system, that handles preGoal/postGoal constructs. What is it NOT? =============== Magic is not perfect. Magic is not complete, or intend to compete with the breadth of plugins for Maven. Magic is not bug-free. Magic is not optimized at all. Just happened to be fast be design. Magic is not necessary going to become a proper product/project, only an experiment at this stage. Magic is not going to replace Ant. Where is it? ============ Magic is checked into the Avalon subversion repo, under tools/magic, and it also requires the system/ directory, which contains all the definition and dependency files. system/ is the 'Project System". legacy/avalon/framwork/api has been updated with a build.properties file, to allow Magic to build it (which takes 3secs on my machine without the download). How do I build and test run it? =============================== 0. You need to run on Linux, or create your own .bat file equivalent to the 'magic' one. You will also need Ant and JDK 1.4 or later. 1. Make sure you have BeanShell 2.0b1 in your Maven repository, under the id bsh. 2. go to tools/magic/engine 3. run "ant" 4. add the directory tools/magic/engine/target/dist/bin to your PATH. 5. go to tools/magic 6. run "magic build" - This will validate and install the plugins. 7. go to legacy/avalon/framework/api 8. run "magic java.compile" or "magic jar.jar" What will happen next? ====================== Features that I will add over the next few days (not necessarily in this order); * JavaDoc plugin. * Unittesting with reporting. * Fix up so that the xdoc plugin works (now missing some jars in classpath). * Filtering in source copying. * Better handling of Site xdoc aggregation in the xdoc plugin. * Add xdocs to the existing plugins. * Some simple sequencing mechanism. * Better error handling. * Better Logging solution, currently a hardcoded ConsoleLogger. I will try to entertain any feedback received, but please be realistic about any feature requests. I will try my best to get you going, and explain how one can write plugins, and how the system hangs together. I hope someone will find the experiment interesting, and as the acronym suggests, I will not entertain people who only wishes to piss on the 'bad things', I have better things to do than convince people with opinions :o) Cheers Niclas -- +------//-------------------+ / http://www.bali.ac / / http://niclas.hedhman.org / +------//-------------------+ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
