[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
So my questions to the ant community:
* What is commons launcher doing that ANT alone isnt?
Personally I havent heard from commons-launcher before. As you said it
seems
that commons-launcher is a modified copy of ant-launcher. So the best
place
to ask this would be (IMHO) the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list.
I have already made inquiries on the user/[EMAIL PROTECTED] lists, and I have
also tried contacting the project developers directly. Unfortunately I
have had little response, which I why I feel that perhaps there is some
interest within the ANT community. Hence my posting here.
* Can ANT be used as a launch process for Java
processes/daemons without significant problems?
The ant-launcher is implemented in the package oata.launch [1]. It was
designed
as a replacement to the very heavy start scripts (bat,sh...). So it
focused on
Ant's needs.
The launcher [2] does not start any new process - it uses the current
one. So I dont think that you can launch processes/deamons with the
launcher. BUT: maybe a buildfile with <exec>/<java> and fork="true"
would help.
As this is beyond Ant's focus I would not say that there are no
significant problems. But _maybe_ it works ;-)
Thanks for the code pointers. I'll be sure to take a look at them.
* Is there any interest within the ANT community to support this
use-case natively within ANT?
Mmmh - there was a discussion earlier. The only future I would see is a
base or utility class without any Ant specific stuff in ant-launcher
which could be reused in Ant's own launcher. I think that was the
intention in commons-launcher.
But Ant does not want to depend on a 3rd party library in that core
area. Have in mind: 400+ projects are using Ant for their bootstrapping
just in Gump ... And having a circular dependency between Ant and
commons-launcher is also not a good thing ...
Obviously I understand that ANT is a critically important piece of
infrastructure for a huge number of projects, and I understand that
ANT's primary focus is and always will be as a build tool.
My only point is that *MAYBE* if it is not too much work, ANT can be
adapted to also fill this role. I have looked at other projects such as:
* http://classworlds.codehaus.org/launchusage.html
* http://wrapper.tanukisoftware.org/doc/english/introduction.html
However I personally feel that reusing ANT build files for this sort of
thing is a more elegant solution, as it can leverage knowledge of ANT
for configuration of classpaths, properties, etc...
*If* the ant-launcher could be modified to support this use-case without
any external dependencies etc, I feel it would nicely fill a need in the
Java community. Obviously adopting ANT to a task it was not designed
for is not a decision that should be taken lightly, but I feel it would
be valuable, and can't see why it should impact ANT's use as a build tool.
At the end of the day, I like commons launcher and would be completely
happy with it, if it had a community behind it, willing to fix the few
bugs I have encountered and drive some more features.
So, my current options appear to be either:
1. Suggest the ANT project adopts the use-case of an application launcher.
2. Patch commons-launcher myself (which I may well do) and persuade the
project maintainers to accept my patches (unlikely given the projects
lack of developers/community).
3. Fork commons-launcher and maintain it outside of Apache.
The first suggestion is the lowest cost to me, as it means others can
maintain, run and manage the project. I appreciate that many factors
are likely to prevent this. If ANT can be modified in the manner you
suggest, what are the barriers?
The other two options require a significant investment of my (and
hopefully others) time.
What does the ANT community think?
R.
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