Joshua ChaitinPollak wrote:
I just polled the rest of my development team for who still uses our ant build system and why.
One view from the maven side - one thing the ant people should never do, is hold your release procedures to ransom.
We have a large project that has as one of its core deliverables rapid release turnaround time. Using the maven release plugin, a complete release is achieved using two commands[1] in under twenty minutes[2].
If the addition of ant forces you to have to jump through additional hoops to get your code released, then ant has become a liability to the project and needs to be fixed.
[1] mvn release:prepare followed by release:perform.[2] Some people have expressed surprise that a release could take "as long as twenty minutes". A little digging usually reveals that their "release" means copy a jar from some untraceable working copy on some developer's machine, and put that into production, and that is it.
In maven-land, "prepare the release" means to sanity check the working copy for incomplete checkins, build and run unit tests to prove that there is any point in releasing at all, tag the release in source control, and bump the version numbers in the poms as appropriate.
"perform the release" means to check out the tag pristine from source control (this can take a while), build the code, upload the code to the maven repository, build the documentation, upload the documentation to the website hosting the documentation.
I have never encountered an ant script used in the wild that did a fraction of this at release time.
Regards, Graham --
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