Hi Raja, I think this question arises on this user list every now and then. I even think there have been some effort to create a pom.xml for tomcat, but without great success (after few replies you can imagine why). Personally I totally understand you. From what I see ant is totally gone and has been replaced by maven virtually everywhere. Also the tool support for maven is much better as for ant. However, there are reasons why maven has been so successful, and it is one of the reasons, why it still not used here.
1) maven has an absolutely superior dependency management to what ant ever had to offer, with or without ivy. 2) and more important, maven is not only a build tool, it defines the project layout, the build cycles and how you have to work with the project (meaning releases, branching etc). All of that is missing completely in ant, ant lets you create whatever development system you want, but you have to do it all the way alone. Maven gives you one, and if you agree to use it, you will safe a lot of time and can put your effort in things that matter more. Now, see, this is exactly the problem. Tomcat as a project was there long before maven team layed out how they imagine people should work. And since tomcat is doing stuff it's own way, it will be a huge portion of work to make it work with a pom. So if you want to work with a pom and maven, you maybe start your work exactly there ;-) regards Leon P.S. The opinion that "ant is gone" is of course solely mine and based on personal experience only ;-) No flame please. On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 5:57 PM, Raja Anbazhagan < raja.anbazhagan1...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm new to tomcat project and I wanted to take a look at the code base to > see if I can contribute in any which ways. But after going through the > build process and setting up every other tools used to build ant, I'm a bit > frustrated. > > Why didnt we migrated this project to a better build tool like maven or > gradle so that the contributor can spend less time setting up the code and > more time on actually working on the contribution part.? > > - Raja >
