Re: Ant rant
On Mon, 13 Nov 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If it works out-of-box with jikes 1.12, then awesome! (I've had problems with 1.12 because of the multibyte encoding changes between 1.11 and 1.12) I use it with jikes most of the time. If you are on unix, you can use an .antrc and ANT_OPTS="-Dbuild.compiler=jikes" BTW, if you are an expert ( or know how to use :-) autoconf, it would be really great to contribute an autoconf script for mod_jk ( and mod_warp when ready ). I'll look into it. I also think some of the features of autoconf ( like looking for a package in multiple places ) are very nice - for a while ( when I had more time ) I tried to port some of them to ant. That would be VERY cool. Another intersting project ( if you prefer makefiles ) is to write a simple XSL stylesheet to convert from Ant build.xml to a makefile. I think ( hope ) most of the ant tasks can be easily converted to the make equivalent ( java, cp, mkdir, etc ) and in the worse case a small "java runAntTask foo " can deal with the rest of the tasks. Yes, I mentioned something like this earlier. And when I say make I should clarify that I mean gmake, which is far more flexible than SysV make ( I like and use ant, but it's just a tool - and everyone should use whatever tools work best for him ) Costin As you could probably already figure, I'm becoming an Ant convert. The thing that broke the whole log jam for me was that I can continue to use jikes, which turns a project that takes 1 hour to compile with javac into 10 minutes with Jikes. -- Nicolaus Bauman - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Ant rant
And don't say "ant is cross platform, make is not" because that just isn't true. Was someone just bored with the wheel and wanted to reinvent it? Ant is more than a cross platform make utility. Ant is platform independent, which means alot more than cross platform. Ant is a make utility geared to meet the needs of Java. Java is "Write once run anywhere" and so is Ant. It is also specifically made to meet the build requirements of Java code, capable of anything from creating Jars to Javadocs. Its very easy to learn and its high modularity makes it very easy to expand. Ant also goes further than make by adapting to XML for data representation and I assume there is no need for me to go into the benefits of that :) My 2 cents Michael Stanley - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Ant rant
"These kids today and their 'ant's! What's the world coming to?" But I'll agree, and _is_ more intuitive and elegant than Make. But I put them at about equal in difficulty in learning curve. BTW, for those who are interested, I've asked our CTO if I can release the maketools I used to compile Tomcat. Now, about my broken Tomcat 3.2b7 build... On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, person wrote: I'm another young developer, in the sense that I'm inexperienced - my first projects have been started about 8-9 months ago. I was faced with the choice of either learning ant or learning make, the two build systems available to me that I knew of. I expended a few hour of effort on each, and it's quite conclusive for me: ant is far and a way the more intuitive, elegant tool of the two. I grew up in OO concepts, it just feels like ant is a natural fit with java. Also, I seem to remember something on the ant page itself about why it was written instead of the author just using make. http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/, that's it. I give +1 for ant because of the learning curve involved, esp. when attracting new developers, considering that tomcat is likely to live a long lifetime and will likely (hopefully) see many new hands helping out. Micah Blake McCurdy The memory management on PowerPC can be used to frighten small children. -- Linus Torvalds On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Rob S. wrote: Allow me to insert my Java / *nix developer novice-compared-to-people-here 2c =) I've only been paid to write Java code for 6 months as a co-op. There were 10+ developers at the company, and only one of them understood makefiles. That one person wrote and maintained a number of makefiles, and it really came down to not being "worth it" for the rest of us to understand the Makefile format. Why? When the files were there and working and everyone was happy. With Ant, I was able to accomplish the same thing, and fully understand the "whys" and "hows" of everything that was going on, in about 10 minutes (with the help of the ant docs and examples of course) and as many lines of XML. I've always considered it peripheral to getting "real work" done, so I don't wish to devote much brain power to it. Call me lazy, but that's just the way I am ;) I actually have dreaded having to learn the Makefile format for my personal projects and when I got a hold of Ant, I was very relieved! - r p.s. i don't mean to trivialize the Makefile stuff. It's funky! -Original Message- From: Nick Bauman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: November 12, 2000 5:11 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Ant rant On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Michael Stanley wrote: And don't say "ant is cross platform, make is not" because that just isn't true. Was someone just bored with the wheel and wanted to reinvent it? Ant is more than a cross platform make utility. Ant is platform independent, which means alot more than cross platform. Ant is a make utility geared to meeet the needs of Java. Java is "Write once run anywhere" and so is Ant. It is also specifically made to meet the build requirements of Java code, capable of anything from creating Jars to Javadocs. Its very easy to learn and its high modularity makes it very easy to expand. I guess this is an important distinction to some people. I'm not a purist; the JVM is written in C, so none of us can claim to be purists ;) Ant also goes further than make by adapting to XML for data representation and I assume there is no need for me to go into the benefits of that :) Once again, standard data representation as opposed to problem-specific data representation is an important distinction to some people. What would really be nice would be if there were some kind or translator that could convert a GNU Makefile into Ant build script and vice versa. Is this on the radar screen Ant devleopers? I have all kinds of problems using new versions of Tomcat (and someone said that they are suprised at how few people try the milestone builds / betas) and many of them come from problems with Ant. So I think Ant is actually _preventing_ people from getting the most out of Tomcat. (just an opinion: no flame intended!) Many many programs that use autoconf are out there in OSS. I feel like we aren't leveraging our own past. My 2 cents Michael Stanley And only mine as well, summarized by "Stand on The Shoulders of Giants" Nick - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscrib
Re: Ant rant
Nick Bauman wrote: I have all kinds of problems using new versions of Tomcat (and someone said that they are suprised at how few people try the milestone builds / betas) and many of them come from problems with Ant. So I think Ant is actually _preventing_ people from getting the most out of Tomcat. (just an opinion: no flame intended!) Your comment prompted me to do a quick check of the download counts for the latest betas and milestones: Tomcat 3.2-b7 (posted last night): Binary distribution: 434 successful downloads Source distribution: 114 successful downloads (These numbers will undoubtedly climb rapidly since this is basically only people paying attention on a weekend.) Tomcat 4.0-m4 (posted 11/1/2000): Binary distribution: 2922 successful downloads Source distribution: 533 successful downloads In addition, there are also an unknown number of people keeping up to date via anonymous CVS and/or nightly builds. (Ant 1.2 binaries have been downloaded 7,563 times since they were posted 10/25/2000.) Many many programs that use autoconf are out there in OSS. I feel like we aren't leveraging our own past. One interesting note about your rant is that the only people who care about Ant in the first place are those trying to build Tomcat from source (or want to use it for their own development). If you just need a binary build of Tomcat (which is definitely the majority case), Ant is irrelevant. (And the particular classpath error that bit you would have shown up with a makefile too :-) Another note is a voice of personal experience. I've been doing primarily Java development for the last four years, and (until Ant came along) creating Make files that knew how to deal with Java's package structure correctly was always painful and error-prone. The arcane syntax and all the "magical" behavior is, quite frankly, a real pain. And it was never easy to port from the idiosyncracies of one "make" to another. Sure, I could have invested the time to become a "make maven", but expertise in this area doesn't pay the rent -- getting programs completed does. Autoconf? Well, the whole reason that autoconf exists is to make the fact that platforms are not compatible less painful -- but well designed Java programs don't suffer much from that. The fact that Ant runs out of the box on any platform with a JVM -- without having any configuration other than getting the classpath right -- tells me that tools like autoconf are no longer relevant to my life. Good riddance to them ... :-) A final note -- an increasing number of the Java based open source projects I'm familiar with, including many outside *.apache.org, have adopted Ant as their portable build tool. So I'm clearly not the only one who feels this way. My 2 cents Michael Stanley And only mine as well, summarized by "Stand on The Shoulders of Giants" I am. I hope that I will never ever have to write another makefile or set up another config script. Thank you Ant developers! Nick Craig McClanahan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Ant rant
ya
see below
The memory management on PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.
-- Linus Torvalds
On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Nick Bauman wrote:
On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Craig R. McClanahan wrote:
{snip}
I'll take "doesn't pay the rent to know that" as probably the bottom line
answer, and I'll agree. Has anyone gotten Jikes to work with ant?
I have
just wrapping in a shell script is what I do
java -Dbuild.compiler=jikes org.apache.ant.Main -f build.xml
or did you mean _compiling_ ant with jikes? that I've never tried
Micah Blake McCurdy
-
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
