XML is just a standard way of formatting data. In this case, the lines of data are script commands. You could define this format as a scripting language. Each tool has its own formatting syntax. If you look at Make, it has its own format that has the problem of the first character on a line having to be a tab character to be a command for a target.
XML format is just the format that was chosen for ant to describe the scripting. This is not a battle that will be won on merit since it sounds like it is a religious issue for this developer. ANT is not an industry standard. I do not even know if I could define it as a best practice although I think it might be close. It is a tool that used by many people to automate their build and deployment of code. It is very good at what it does which is why it is a popular as it is. It was designed to simplify the maintenance of the build process as a replacement to Make. I have one project that developed their own build and deployment tool using Perl which works fine for what they are doing. It is labor intensive and has to be maintained in both the program and the script. When I told them about Ant, they liked the idea an are looking at moving to it. Ant is an open source tool that most developer teams do not have to maintain. The have to maintain just the script for their project and even there, it may not take much work once the script is developed. If it does not do what you want to do with it, you can extend it. It is very good and doing repetitive tasks over and over. It is not the only tool for doing builds but it is a good one even with some of the quirks like wanting optional code in ANT_HOME/lib. There are other tools that have been developed for doing project builds but a lot of them like Maven, still use XML as the format for the commands. Chris Erskine EDS Consulting Services F5-EDS-001 2424 Garden of the Gods Rd Colorado Springs, CO 80919 Phone: 719-535-6064 Phone: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _____ From: Andreas Bothner [ MTN - Innovation Centre ] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 5:04 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: winning the case for ANT Hi all, I am working in a team of developers, where one developer is completely against the use of ANT as a build script as he feels that xml should not be used as a scripting tool. I would like to create an environment which does automated nightly builds, deployments and execution of tests with reports. This team members negativity is hampering commitment towards this goal. I was hoping there would be somebody who could direct me to a resource(s) that will strengthen my case for the use of ANT, as I see it as the perfect tool to achieve this goal and am under the impression that it is the industry standard for non-proprietary java build tools. Regards, Andreas
