winning the case for ANT 2004-10-15 - By Erskine, Chris
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:chris.erskine@(protected) <mailto:chris.erskine@(protected)>
_____
From: Andreas Bothner [ MTN - Innovation Centre ]
[mailto:Bothne_A@(protected)]
Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 5:04 AM
To: user@(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
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