2012/2/17 Bruce Atherton <br...@callenish.com>: > A lot of companies have their own, internally written build file generators > just so their build systems are consistent and exactly what they want. Our > Related Projects and External Tools page has some of these that were made > public, I suspect. > > Surely there is a better way than requiring users of Ant to write generators > to deal with the complexity and keep it customized.
At one point I did write a build(s) (XSLT-based) generator specifically for a large and hairy project. Later I rewrote the whole thing with macrodefs. But my point is that I don't view build generators as bad, in fact it often helps IMHO to have a declarative custom DSL (in XML in my case, so read "DSL" with a grain of salt) that's used as the input for generating Ant build fragments, and have those fragments be able to "insert" them into the target graph. I've also long felt Ant needed generalized if/unless/os (and my own extensions like ifTrue, unlessTrue, when) on any "XML tag" (or UnknownElement if you prefer), just read the recent "add if/unless to <javac>'s <compilerarg>" thread. <macrodef> is nice, but you can't use it for arbitrary, *and conditional*, XML "fragments" inside tasks. All those things you can often do more easily with a generator, but that's often cumbersome, doesn't play well with IDEs, etc... I guess I'm saying I've often wished for generator-like features as a built-in part of Ant. Do you see what I'm saying? Ant now does late "conversion" from UnkownElement to actual configuration of the Java code it maps to, and a way to influence/transform that almost AST-like graph would make Ant more powerful and flexible, perhaps at the expense of creating "dialects" unreadable to someone not familiar with them. Given Ant's XML roots, perhaps a tighter built-in integration with XSLT to dynamically "rewrite" the build at runtime/buildtime would be one way to achieve what I envision (notwithstanding the talks of non-XML front-ends of course). Stepping of my soapbox now :) What I'm saying has nothing to do with Java7, nor necessarily require a rewrite either. --DD --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org
