I'm another young developer, in the sense that I'm inexperienced - my
first projects have been started about 8-9 months ago. I was faced with
the choice of either learning ant or learning make, the two build systems
available to me that I knew of. I expended a few hour of effort on each,
and it's quite conclusive for me: ant is far and a way the more intuitive,
elegant tool of the two. I grew up in OO concepts, it just feels like ant
is a natural fit with java. Also, I seem to remember something on the ant
page itself about why it was written instead of the author just using
make. http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/, that's it.
I give +1 for ant because of the learning curve involved, esp. when
attracting new developers, considering that tomcat is likely to live a
long lifetime and will likely (hopefully) see many new hands helping out.
Micah Blake McCurdy
The memory management on PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.
-- Linus Torvalds
On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Rob S. wrote:
> Allow me to insert my Java / *nix developer novice-compared-to-people-here
> 2c =)
>
> I've only been paid to write Java code for 6 months as a co-op. There were
> 10+ developers at the company, and only one of them understood makefiles.
> That one person wrote and maintained a number of makefiles, and it really
> came down to not being "worth it" for the rest of us to understand the
> Makefile format. Why? When the files were there and working and everyone
> was happy.
>
> With Ant, I was able to accomplish the same thing, and fully understand the
> "whys" and "hows" of everything that was going on, in about 10 minutes (with
> the help of the ant docs and examples of course) and as many lines of XML.
>
> I've always considered it peripheral to getting "real work" done, so I don't
> wish to devote much brain power to it. Call me lazy, but that's just the
> way I am ;) I actually have dreaded having to learn the Makefile format for
> my personal projects and when I got a hold of Ant, I was very relieved!
>
> - r
>
> p.s. i don't mean to trivialize the Makefile stuff. It's funky!
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Nick Bauman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: November 12, 2000 5:11 PM
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: Ant rant
> >
> >
> > On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Michael Stanley wrote:
> >
> > > > And don't say "ant is cross platform, make is not" because
> > that just isn't
> > > > true. Was someone just bored with the wheel and wanted to reinvent it?
> > >
> > > Ant is more than a cross platform make utility. Ant is
> > platform independent,
> > > which means alot more than cross platform. Ant is a make
> > utility geared to meeet
> > > the needs of Java. Java is "Write once run anywhere" and so
> > is Ant. It is also
> > > specifically made to meet the build requirements of Java code,
> > capable of
> > > anything from creating Jars to Javadocs. Its very easy to
> > learn and its high
> > > modularity makes it very easy to expand.
> >
> > I guess this is an important distinction to some people. I'm not a
> > purist; the JVM is written in C, so none of us can claim to be purists ;)
> >
> > > Ant also goes further than make by adapting to XML for data
> > representation and I
> > > assume there is no need for me to go into the benefits of that :)
> >
> > Once again, standard data representation as opposed to problem-specific
> > data representation is an important distinction to some people.
> >
> > What would really be nice would be if there were some kind or translator
> > that could convert a GNU Makefile into Ant build script and vice versa. Is
> > this on the radar screen Ant devleopers?
> >
> > I have all kinds of problems using new versions of Tomcat (and someone
> > said that they are suprised at how few people try the milestone builds /
> > betas) and many of them come from problems with Ant. So I think Ant is
> > actually _preventing_ people from getting the most out of Tomcat. (just an
> > opinion: no flame intended!)
> >
> > Many many programs that use autoconf are out there in OSS. I feel like we
> > aren't leveraging our own past.
> >
> > > My 2 cents
> > > Michael Stanley
> > >
> >
> > And only mine as well, summarized by "Stand on The Shoulders of Giants"
> >
> > Nick
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> >
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
