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20021217 Tuesday December 17, 2002

Ant Sucks? Puleeze! Markus Kohler seems to think that Ant sucks. Personally, I love Ant, so I guess you could say I'm biased ;) I'm posting this in hopes that Erik Hatcher will see it and offer a rebuttal. I don't know that there is one, but I figured it's worth a try. Posted in Java at Dec 17 2002, 11:11:59 PM MST 4 Comments

Comments:

Markus' comments are actually accurate about Ant's limitations. It is not perfect, and certainly its tougher to do some things in Ant that you could easily do in a pure scripting environment. Bring your constructive criticism over to the ant-dev e-mail list and help us improve it. The benefits of Ant, though, far outweigh the alternatives - its supported in all IDE's now and is pretty much the de facto build tool for Java. Let's improve it!

Posted by Erik Hatcher on December 18, 2002 at 03:08 AM MST #

Everybody knows that Ant has limitations as a scripting language. There are basically 2 ways to obtain more expression power with Ant: 1) Add the power to Ant. 2) Use a more powerful scripting tool on top of Ant. Erik seems to suggest (1). I disagree with you Erik. Ant's success is due to two things: A simple language and a rich featureset. The same story as Java really. If you clutter up the language too much, you'll lose success. Just wait until Java get closures and generics and what not. Then people will *really* start looking for something else. Like they did with C++. I prefer (2), and this is already achieved with Jelly/Maven. A platform that sits on top of Ant, with a more powerful scripting language: Jelly. So quit your bitching about Ant, Markus. Ant is great for most things. If you need more power, use Maven+Jelly.

Posted by Aslak Hellesøy on December 18, 2002 at 05:57 AM MST #

And I forgot to say that Maven (and Krysalis Centipede) add reusability. Reusable "build logic" is bundled as Maven plugins and Centipede "cents". It's funny how Markus complains about Ant not being rule based. -And then je suggests Jython, Judoscript, JRuby and Javascript. Lost me there.

Posted by Aslak Hellesøy on December 18, 2002 at 06:22 AM MST #

Aslak - I agree with what you are saying as well, to a large extent. What I mean by "improving Ant" did not imply exclusions of the other layers such as Maven and Centipede. These are great steps in making up for needs not met by Ant alone. I think there is some middle ground not yet met completely by Maven/Centipede that can only take place with some refactorings of Ant to provide project and target reusability which would be leveragable by these other tools. Improvements must be made at all tiers! :)

Posted by Erik Hatcher on December 18, 2002 at 12:24 PM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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