On Apr 5, 2004, at 6:01 AM, Erik Hatcher wrote:
And also two active Ant committers views here (follow link to Stefan's blog):
http://www.iseran.com/Steve/blog/archives/000103.html
My take, which includes many in-person conversations about Ant with JDD, is that XML was a very *pragmatic* choice at the time. If it is no longer the best way to do things, then we should evolve rather than feel stuck in a rut of angle brackets. Maven and Jelly aren't the next big thing, IMO. In fact, the creator of Jelly apologizes for it:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/2004/03/26.html#a472
and mentions Gravy. Rake is also a cool alternative. Gravy could be the next step, maybe? Obviously we're grappling with the boundaries between scripting and being declarative. The big system builds that I have crafted have gotten ugly over time and end up being tougher to maintain than I'd like. Scripting has not been a need, although we do have some code generation (Ruby + ERb) that we fire off with <exec>. With the new power of Antlib/<macrodef>/<scriptdef>, so much of the scripting can be hidden quite cleanly behind standard Ant task syntax.
I'm agile, but pragmatic. While the force of an established user base is strong - we're dealing with "soft"ware here. It is malleable and we should be ready and willing to effect changes. The lure of Maven, Groovy, and the plethora of new frameworks, API's, tools out there show that many are not adverse to change despite the hurdles.
And the irony is, with JDD doing so much Cocoa Mac development now, he's using make under the covers of Xcode :)
Erik
On Apr 2, 2004, at 9:19 PM, Drew Davidson wrote:
Just got this forwarded to me by a friend. An interesting perspective on the original genesis and eventual evolution of Ant.
http://x180.net/Articles/Java/AntAndXML.html
It is reminicent of Stuart Feldman, author of the original make, who rethought using tab as a start character for the executable part of a target but couldn't change it because he already had a supported user base.
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