On 9/15/05, Ashley Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I've actually been talking about ant tasks, whereas I think Chris
> (correct me if I'm wrong) was talking about whole build.xml files. I
> don't see this as somehow replacing any of what Maven has to offer,
> it just offers another language for writing plugins in besides java.
> I mean how much more damage can I do in ant than I can do in Java ;)

I am talking about whole build files, although ones that are likely
single purpose.

Case in point; I have an Axis build file that ultimately uses the
Axis-provided ant task; wsdl2java. But this build step (generating
Java Stubs, Proxies, etc from a WSDL) is significantly more
complicated than that. It actually requires many internal targets to
accomplish (e.g. check if files are up-to-date, HTTP GET the WSDL if
it's not local, disallow RPC-style WSDL, copy the gen-ed files, etc.
etc.) In the end, it's ~325 lines of Ant. My job was only to script it
-- not to code or debug the underlying Tasks. That would be a waste of
my time...

I agree w/ Ashley (hopefully I'm not putting words in her mouth ;-).
It is in no way perverse to embed Ant. And it in no way undermines the
usefulness of Maven. On the contrary, it opens up Maven to a huge
realm of possibility. To me it is akin to Ant providing an <exec>
Task. Sometimes you have no choice but to wrap out to something else.
It's all about getting the job done -- and the right tool for the job.

In fact, IMO, Maven should provide the same sort of interoperability
w/ Python, Ruby, and Perl. Embrace them and make them first class
citizens. As we all know, one can do magic in, say, Perl, that is much
too long-winded in Java.

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