I don't like like Maven - great concepts, poor execution IMO. There are a few other developers on this list that feel the same way and can attribute to the pain it causes due to its inflexibility. I know Allan has attested a number of times that when at his previous company he had to make customizations, they wrote Maven plugins. But he said that the plugins were difficult to maintain, sometimes broke after Maven upgrades, and often required deep knowledge of Maven's inner workings to write correctly. Allan, please correct me if I've misquoted you.
Based on Allan's comments and my own exposure to Maven as well as Jeremy's input over time, I just prefer not to go down a road that might cause problems later. I want something that in concept works like Maven, but doesn't have the stigma of being difficult to deal with if you need to do something non-standard. Allan's and my experiences only further solidified that opinion. Gradle sits on top of ant and ivy and adds some Maven features without getting in your way. It is the best of all 3 (IMO) because it wraps them and enables the power of each without restricting you Also, .gradle build scripts are just Groovy files, but with a bunch of domain-specific Gradle closures, which allows us to do anything Groovy can do. Ant and Ivy are first class citizens, allowing native usage if you want to. Gradle's default conventions are very similar (if not identical) to Maven, but it took me all of 4 lines of Groovy code to make overrides that match the directory structure of an existing large project that didn't (thank God) follow Maven's default directory layout. It was painless. So with Gradle (based on my admittedly limited experience), you get build-by-convention, without any pain when it comes to customization. It was a very pleasant experience. Concerning buildr - I haven't looked at or used it, so I can't say yay or nay to it. At first glance, it appears to be ruby-based. I can't say enough about using a proper scripting language to perform customization or conditional logic - SO much easier than XML. But, given my choice, I'd gladly stick with Groovy, as it is so like Java, it took almost no time to learn. I don't use Ruby for anything else in my personal or professional projects, so I wouldn't want to bother with it just for a build system. Groovy is the way to go for existing Java developers IMO. So, my recommendation was just based on the experience that I had at work this week, and given that it was so pleasant, thought it would be nice to have the same feeling in JSecurity :) On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Emmanuel Lecharny <[email protected]> wrote: > Les Hazlewood wrote: >> >> Hi team, >> > > <snip/> >> >> What do you guys think of using Gradle to build JSecurity? >> > > JSecurity is 16 Kslocs atm, and it's one single module. I don't see how it > can be a burden to move the build to Maven 2... Anyway. > > We have a working ant+ivy build, why do we have to switch to something else > ? Why gradle, instead of system like maven or buildr, for which we have some > fellow apachers ready to give a hand ? > > > -- > -- > cordialement, regards, > Emmanuel Lécharny > www.iktek.com > directory.apache.org > > >
