On 9/15/06, Jesse Glick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My personal experience with Ant has always been that the tasks are
great, and the control flow is maddening. [...]
I don't buy the argument that Ant is currently "declarative". It's
nothing of the sort in my experience. [...]
Whao, it's good you got that off your chest Jesse ;-)
Great post! I don't agree on all your points, but my experience is not
far from your own. I too would like to have an official and easy to
use scripting language always available in Ant (and ECMAScript is a
good condidate), but as a way to extend the default Ant behavior or do
a one off thing for a given build, not to replace the current Ant.
What you describe (Ant in JavaScript, or a build tool as a script
language program) as already been done in Ruby, or Python (A-A-P) and
probably lots others. It's a radical change from the current Ant, and
one that, despite the scripty nature of current Ant builds, would only
lead to even more scripty and spaghetti build "programs". I could be
wrong of course.
I have no doubt BTW that you could write a JavaScript-based
Ant-equivalent that leverages the current Ant tasks. Maybe you should
even starts such a project, and do changes in the core where necessary
to support this project, but Ant should go on in its current XML-based
form IMHO, however flowed many people find it.
--DD
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