As a matter of fact, I like Ant for shell script-like situations. In fact, I've been thinking about wrapping Ant inside a Java installer solution for my stand-alone projects. Think about it: Ant has first-class file system constructs (paths, files, etc.), first-class modification checks, has very flexible configurability, its XML underpinnings give you some static analysis capabilities, and it's extensible. Yeah, you can think of it as a "poor" general purpose programming language, but it's not meant to be a general purpose programming language. It was designed to operate in a very specific niche. As such, it does some things quite well and other things are almost an afterthought. That's okay. Like Reinier said, right tool for the job. And yes, it's possible to make a mess of things. Even if many people do, I don't see it as a sweeping condemnation of the platform for people that know what they're doing.
Alexey ________________________________ From: phil swenson <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: Reinier Zwitserloot <[email protected]>; Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]>; Moandji Ezana <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, March 8, 2011 9:44:28 PM Subject: Re: [The Java Posse] Is learning languages overrated? >Learn to use your tools, people. Writing your own ant task is trivial, as is >hooking it up 'live' (i.e. first building it, then >using it, all in one ant >invocation). The whole point of ant has always been that you should NOT be >programming in >it. Personally I strongly believe any sufficiently complicated >build will ALWAYS end up requiring programming, which >means both ant and >maven >are probably misguided (if anything ant moreso because creating a list of >sequential ant >tasks such as 'mkdir' and 'javac' feels rather eerily similar >to >programming). Both of those tools do however allow >you to write plugins. I >strongly suggest you get to grips with that. Do you write your shell scripts in XML? Why not? Even the guy who created ant (James Duncan Davidson) now thinks XML was a bad idea. Why continue down the painful path when better paths are available (buildr/gradle)? perhaps you haven't seen the insanity I've seen, so you don't fully appreciate how F'ed up an ant build can get. You can say 'then they are doing it wrong.' Maybe - but I see it done wrong over and over again. You think it's "trivial" to create an ant task. Well, it means switching contexts and writing another build script to build your build script's tasks. It's too heavy. Which is why these contorted constructs like ant contrib and the macro tasks exist. > In regards to JSP/Velocity to mix config XML and source: Oh hell no. That's a horrible idea. Not convincing. You think adding loops and variables inside your JSP's HTML is a horrible idea? Same thing. -- 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. -- 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.
