Steve Loughran schrieb am 12.06.2009 um 11:49:48 (+0100): > 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.
I see. > >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 I use XSLT a lot, and I really like XML. It lets you operate at a high level, and with great flexibility. Sorry for conveying the expression that it was the XML nature of Ant that I found clunky. It's rather that by comparison of the Ant and XSLT syntaxes, I found Ant much more difficult to memorize: path, location, name, file, dir - these are all too similar to me, and I pick the wrong one. Just lack of habit, I gues. Well, XSLT certainly has been given much more time for language design. > 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. I see; makes sense. > 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. It's good guidance to know what not to attempt in Ant. > >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. Thanks for these historical insights! > >(Still no Perl.) > > There is a bit of perl in Ant, still works. C:\jlib\ant-1.7.1 :: dir /s /b *.pl C:\jlib\ant-1.7.1\bin\antRun.pl C:\jlib\ant-1.7.1\bin\complete-ant-cmd.pl C:\jlib\ant-1.7.1\bin\runant.pl :-) Michael Ludwig --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@ant.apache.org
