On Thursday, Jun 12, 2003, at 22:23 US/Pacific, Conor MacNeill wrote:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ant-dev&m=105516662409107&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.
Cool. My only thought here is that I've been doing quite a bit of work with Sherlock where you can define functionality in either JavaScript or XQuery and all the little scriptlets are embedded in tags. After a few months of playing with that approach, I've really decided that I dislike writing code between XML tags. Mental shifts and all that. But that's just a personal finding. YMMV.
Also, there's an entire discussion that could be had of where the control flow should be (inside or outside).
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"/>
No, in this example it doesn't. But it'll be interesting to see if the full expressiveness of the language can be brought to bear on the problem. I'm not endorsing making the big shift now, but I do like Jonathan's approach as an experiment. If it turns out that having the full expressiveness of the language allows a shift in the way that you can do things, then great, it's a success. If all you've done is like you've shown above and end up with simple replacements, then it's still nice (though maybe not as nice) from the point of shifting logic from the inside of the tag to the outside.
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.
Possible. Though auto-gen code usually doesn't do that good a job at allowing a paradigm shift in thinking.
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.
It is a tradeoff. And it's one that will take a bit of experience with playing with a new model to figure out if its worthwhile or not. In any case, I'm still off playing with Mac stuff so my involvement will be limited to just seeing how things turn out.
James Duncan Davidson Coder, Speaker, Author http://x180.net/ [life live];
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