RE: [binarycloud-dev] ANT vs. MAKE

[<bin...@li...>]

Hi Alex,

>> - standardized and established
>> - really portable (unix, linux, windows) without having
>> extra utilities installed (only requirement is jre)
>
>The JRE requirement bugs me a little (yet more pain in the
>ass setup... but I'm still interested)

Hmm. I'd no problems with it. Just untared it into /opt and set up
JAVA_HOME, and included it in path.

>> - very powerful and flexible xml configuration of
>> the build process
>
>ooh.

I attached a example build file. It's from EIRC java chat client applet.
It's a small project and the build.xml gives a brief overview of the very
basic ant feautures.

>> - don't mess around with make & various command line tools
>
>If we build a configure system I don't see that being a problem.

Not really, at least under unix like systems. But much people develop and
set up complete dev system on windows, so I think they don't want to mess
around with cygwin. Especially in the enterprise sector java is established
and it would be convinient for those people to handle this, they want to
have a _fast_ setup process, not messing around downloading additional
tools.


>> - recursive build support (call ant on every package level,
>We'll do that (easily) with gnu make.

Jepp, I just wanted to point out that ANT can do this, too :-)


>> Of courses it is based on java and so the startup, and
>> execution is not as fast as make and friends.

>And that is a big thing for me, at least.
>I'm taking great pains to design a make system
>that will be as screaming fast as possible.

Yep, thats a good point. But it's only the make process. It's a matter of
how much we could benefit from feautures at the cost of speed. I can't say
not if it's worth it.

>And what we're doing is mostly implemented in php anyway..
>so the role of gnu make will really be just to call our
>utilities in a convenient way.

And that's a thorn in my eye. All this tools required only for basically
calling others.

>Some of the XML config stuff sounds very nice.
>I'd like to see it function before I bit though :)

Ok, I'll experiment with it some time, basically replacing the Make we
currently have. And we'll see how it works.

>I have no hatred for java, _but_ we would be mixing languages and
>that means lots of extra software to install.
That's a point.

>Could you send a little quick-setup example to the list
>so we can check it out and see what we think?

ok, see other mail.


andi