Hi Duncan, You all might like to look at two recent threads in ant-dev and ant-user that are somewhat related to this topic.
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ant-dev&m=105516662409107&w=2 and http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ant-user&m=105491111510585&w=2 Instead of the "script driving Ant tasks" approach, <scriptdef> is more like a script within a task. As such, the scripts would potentially be more focussed on the things that need to be scripty rather than doing the whole build in the script. After all, IMHO, copyWrapper("C:\\java\\jython_ant\\src\HelloJython.java", "C:\\java\\jython_ant\\temp", project) doesn't end up any "better" than <copy file="C:\java\jython_ant\src\HelloJython.java" todir="C:\java\jython_ant\temp"/> In fact because the attributes are named, the XML is easier to understand as it does not rely on implicit position-dependent parameters. IT's more redable which is probably counter-intuitive. In terms of Jonathan's original need for wrappers, there is some possibility that they could be auto-generated using the Ant introspection facilities. One problem is that most Ant tasks support a multitude of attributes. As I said above, XML is quite nice there as it allows attributes to be named. You only provide the attributes you want and mostly everything else takes sensible defaults. In the copy example, think about what the wrapper would look like that exposes all the capabilities of <copy> (http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/copy.html). I think it could be quite ugly unless your scripting language also supports named attributes - I have limited experience with Jython, so I can't say. BTW, I once experimented with converting build files to scripts (code actually). I wrote an XSL template to turn a simple Ant build into a Java program. It was effectively a build compiler (part of Mutant's botostrap process). Here's the XSL http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/ant/proposal/mutant/build/Attic/bootstrap.xsl?rev=1.3&content-type=text/plain You can see the result here. http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/ant/proposal/mutant/src/java/bootstrap/org/apache/ant/builder/Attic/MutantBuilder.java?rev=1.7&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup Not that useful but a bit more grist for this mill. It certainly showed me that it is hard to cram the expressiveness of the XML approach into method calls. I had to limit myself to a very narrow subset of tasks and their usage patterns. Conor --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
