But those initial lumps stay with you a while :)
I can't comment at all on the existing Ant builds as I never had cause to compile Struts myself. If the scripts are as you say, then it certainly lessens my argument somewhat :)
As an aside, the irony here is that I wasn't thrilled with Ant at first either, but I've kind of taken a liking to it lately. For example, just last week I wrote a script that (1) stopped Tomcat (if running), (2) did some initialization tasks to prepare for the build, (3) updated a build number in an About screen JSP, (4) compiled about 200 source files, (5) compiled about 80 JSPs (to servlet and to class, just for verification purposes), (6) ran about 50 JUnit tests, (7) generated javadocs for the entire code base, (8) WARed the application, (9) deployed it under Tomcat (in exploded format, the WAR was created for manual deployment under Websphere), (10) deployed the javadocs to a documentation server, (11) cleaned up (both the build environment and deleted the Tomcat work folder) and (12) restarted Tomcat. The script to me is easy as hell to follow, doesn't require any outside configuration (you just have to update the build number in the build.xml file itself, which you are reminded about when the script is run) and runs in under 50 seconds on my 2-year old PC. I get output to the console as well as a log file too. Of course it was easy to set up for doing this (just had to add the junit.jar to the Ant folder, nothing else beyond the usual simple setup chores).
I was actually doing the same thing with a DOS batch file previously, but now I can run my build under Linux, and its a little easier to follow I think. Call me an Ant convert :)
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
Joe Germuska wrote:
At 2:53 PM -0500 2/23/05, Frank W. Zammetti wrote:
An unsolicited outside comment...
If your intention is to continue to allow the general Struts user community to still be able to build Struts, I would suggest against Maven.
Maven strikes me as considerably more complex and intimidating than does Ant, even if that complexity might be justifiable because Maven is more powerful. I think there is a higher barrier to entry with Maven, and Ant is I think a more common and well-understood tool by most developers.
If this isn't so much a concern though, i.e., if you intend that for the most part only those interested in actively developing Struts should be building it from source, than by all means go with Maven.
It would however be unfortunate if the seemingly simple choice of a build tool discouraged contributions. I'm not saying this would be the case going with Maven, but I *would* be less concerned about this with Ant.
Have you used Maven? I understand that it has a lot of features (perhaps too many) and that it can be a bit slow off the mark, but you never have to modify a single file? I have seen few if any Ant-based projects which didn't require at least a bit of tweaking to a local build.properties file; on the other hand, most Maven projects "just work" if you have Maven installed.
I agree that we don't want to hamper usage by the general community; however, I feel that -- specifically with Struts -- we never had a particularly easy to use Ant build.
Joe
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