Michael Ludwig wrote:
Ina, Antoine schrieb am 11.06.2009 um 19:58:37 (+0200):
I am posing a general question about Ant vs Make vs Batch:
1- What is advantage of Ant script over regular Batch script that
calls up the solution files for all the projects in your system tree
of projects(for Windows platform)
Now what's a "regular Windows batch script"? I like cmd.exe, but come
on, you don't want to program in that language, using GOTO and all that
stuff.
So you'd use WSH with VB, Perl, or whatever.
But then, WSH is no more cross-platform than CMD/BAT files.
For Java, you really want and need a cross-platform solution. The other
day on this list, I wondered why back then, they didn't simply choose
Perl or Python, which were and still are very good cross-platform tools.
Well, why not? :-)
First, Java was Java and couldn't possibly reuse, of all things, Perl.
I will point out that my first contrib to this project was a perl script.
(Although it would have worked very, very well for general purpose OS
and network and mail and whatnot stuff.)
Actually its pretty tricky to write to x-platform perl, ruby or python,
just as it is to do it well in java too.
Then, bootstrapping Java by Java certainly has advantages.
Ant is a language primarily for Java projects. Basing it on Java is not
just an ideological purity game, but the only way to get at those
internal bits of the JDK in the same process. all the original JDK
library tasks: javac, javadoc, rmic, etc do this: we go in and use the
underlying code.
But why the clunky XML syntax? When Ant was conceived, XML was a hot
new thing, the final solution to almost everything, so doing XML was en
vogue.
I know its easy to dismiss it now, but it does have strengths
-any XML editor can work with it
-easy to use with XSLT operations
The XML editing meant that before IDEs had explicit support for the
semantics of Ant (properties, target dependencies), they could let you
edit it in a structured manner.
Language design and syntax coherence probably weren't top priorities.
agreed. However, we do strive to be more declarative than fully
procedural languages, we don't have loops and so lack full
turing-equivalence. There are also limits to what you can do in java
Notice how Ant deliberately leaves out all fault handing too. Not a full
workflow language based on something formal like Milner's Pi-calculus,
obviously.
Somehow, Ant was adopted. How did it happen, and why? Does anyone know?
ant was written by James Duncan Davidson while sun was opening up
Tomcat, moving it from a sun project which used make to something for
anyone to use. Ant was a solution to a tooling problem.
1. There was no open source IDE at that time, open source projects
couldnt mandate a single IDE the way in-house java teams could.
2. there was no way open source projects could mandate a single platform
for the same reason. Today, I'd say "linux 1st, other unixes second,
ignore windows" -this is effectively what Hadoop does.
3. It turned out to offer a profound advantage over IDEs. The lack of an
IDE meant no debugger. All we had left was testing, and as JUnit came
out at the same time, the <junit> task got written, and the world became
a better place. Before then testing wasn't that mainstream, you sat in
front of the IDE and debugged. Now you add tests and wait for email from
the CI tool.
Today, you could also consider shifting off programming work (if you
have to do any) from Ant to Python or JRuby scripts, as there are Java
implementations of these languages. (Still no Perl.)
There is a bit of perl in Ant, still works.
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