Steve Holden <st...@holdenweb.com> writes: Apologies for the piggy back, my Usenet provider can't get the OP's message.
> gslindst...@gmail.com wrote: >> My company is looking at creating a tool to allow us to define and >> manage a process for each job we run (a typical job may be look on a >> customers ftp site for a file, download it, decrypt it and load it into >> our database). We would like something which would allow us to glue >> together various existing processes we currently use into a single unit >> with multiple steps. Along the way, this new routine would need to log >> its progress and be able to report and even handle errors. A coworker >> has suggested we look at Ant ("Another Neat Tool") and, though it looks >> promising, I have reservations. If I recall correctly, it was intended >> as a replacement for "Make" and I worry that we may be trying to force >> Ant to be something it is not. It was intended as a replacement. But you can use it for many other things, without making it feel out of place in my opinion. I do use it exactly the way you describe for various tasks: calling external programs, uploading a file, etc. My personal site, see sig, is generated by a Perl program, and uploaded by another, and some other programs have to run as well, and all is glued together using ant. If I modify an XML file (my site is defined using XML), I do: ant local to update a local version. If I am happy with how it looks, I do ant upload Ant makes several things really easy. The things I do with it would take me more lines in either Perl or Python. So I use Perl (or Python) when it makes things easier, and ant to glue everything together if that's easier. -- John Bokma j3b Hacking & Hiking in Mexico - http://johnbokma.com/ http://castleamber.com/ - Perl & Python Development -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list