If you have already decided that you don't want to hear about Scala, skip this, although it is still applicable to build Java and mixed projects.
In my process of learning Scala, I have been a bit overwhelmed trying to get the tools to work right. Two weeks ago I was so sick of waiting for Maven to build everything again, (I love the dependency management and IDE independence, but don't have much fun using it.) that I decided to take the hit to my scarce time and learn yet another tool, SBT. (I generally dislike spending time configuring stuff.) It wasn't too bad, one evening and I had it configured. I had to fix a couple small errors with my environment settings for Java. My project was pretty simple, so I just let it pickup the dependencies out of the pom file instead of rewriting it. It worked. I have already gained back the time that I lost learning SBT in increased productivity. "~ test-quick" is now my best friend. From the SBT console, this is the magic command that just does what I want. If I change files, it automagically compiles just the changes and runs the tests that either changed or that failed last time. Because I won't be using JRebel anytime soon, this seems like the next best thing, and has saved me time. In my inexperience, I realize that Maven may have the same capability, but it really came down to the fact that I couldn't figure out how to do it with Maven, but it didn't take me very long to be productive with SBT, without being forced to become an unwilling expert. Thanks for the guys that developed the tool and the docs. SBT does some things differently than Maven. It downloads all your dependencies into a local dir. You have to tell it to go get them. Some people don't like this, but I do. I'm not always connected, and this style works great for me. The one issue that is still remaining, is that I can't get SBT to find packages in my local maven repos, even after trying the examples on line. It just never seemed to find it. (Although, I really like that you can set the log level for SBT from the console, so that you can see what it is doing to help figure things out.) I really hope that some day soon, build tools and IDE's will all play nicely for all JVM languages and I won't have to care. I dream of configuring a project once and being able to edit and build and edit it from command line, Eclipse, Netbeans or whatever, but that day is not here yet. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
