Just thought I would throw in the most important factor to me....ANT is
extensible in a very straightforward, comprehensible and resuable manner.
jim
-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Bauman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2000 9:39 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Ant rant
"These kids today and their 'ant's! What's the world coming to?" But I'll
agree, and _is_ more intuitive and elegant than Make. But I put them at
about equal in difficulty in learning curve.
BTW, for those who are interested, I've asked our CTO if I can release the
maketools I used to compile Tomcat.
Now, about my broken Tomcat 3.2b7 build...
On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, person wrote:
> 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
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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> > >
> > >
> >
> >
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> >
> >
>
>
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>
--
Nicolaus Bauman
Software Engineer
Simplexity Systems
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