On Dec 30, 2008, at 8:50 PM, David Jencks wrote:
I will go farther and say that my observation of projects here at apache is that the ones using maven generally are a __LOT__ more open to comments, contributions, integration proposals, and outside interest than the ones using ant. My experience with the ones using ant is generally that they tend to have an attitude that they know better than anyone else how their project might be used or might fit into other contexts.
OK - I can sort of see your point, despite it being a *gross* over- generalization. I agree projects who think they know better than anyone else is bad.
Partly as a result of these experiences and partly due to the typically incomprehensible project organization of ant built projects I have to be MUCH more interested in the subject area of an ant built project before I will investigate it. For me JSecurity is just barely edging over into "worth investigating despite the project organization and build system".
I'm glad that you are interested in investigating JSecurity, even if it's just edging over the line =)
This situation is not all that surprising since maven makes the dependencies on other projects very explicit and clear and provides a uniform and standard way for other projects to deploy on your project. Ant tries to hide the fact that all non-trivial projects depend on other projects and that other projects might want to depend on yours by simply not dealing with it at all. I don't have any experience with ivy so don't have any idea how it might affect this.
I agree here, but only when you're talking about old-school ant projects. Ant+Ivy projects, on the other hand, make dependencies very clear since they define them explicitly in ivy.xml, which is a very concise, easy-to-read file. I encourage you to check out JSecurity's ivy.xml file, which should make it very clear what JSecurity's dependencies are.
I also encourage you to check out some more info on Ant+Ivy vs Maven, as there are tons of blog posts out there on the subject. Here are a couple to get you started: http://ant.apache.org/ivy/m2comparison.html (also check out the links in the first paragraph, which lead to some other viewpoints/debates)
http://www.leshazlewood.com/?p=44 Jeremy
