Ted
> Ant is still mostly just Java and it targets a market that consists of
> millions of existing Java programmers. It takes a Java programmer much
> less than a day to start using Ant because they can easily leverage their
> exiting Java skills when learning how to use it.
Ant has very little to do with Java (despite being written in it and having good
Java build support). It has everything to do with XML. To learn to use Ant you
have to be proficient in XML, not Java. It's extensible nature makes it a very
powerful tool, since we could write Ant targets to handle all sorts of platform
specific linking tasks (eg. JEMBuilder invocation, uVM compiling and more).
Ant build files can be created to be quite flexible and automated (huge builds
are controlled with Ant very successfully). I've used Ant to control many non-
Java based processes.
Note...I am not suggesting that Embedlet users would write the Ant build
files...that would be the responsibility of the Embedlet development team. But
with a bit of documentation (primarily command line and properties file
options), users could easily use Ant to build embedlets and whole Outpost
Container-based applications.
It's like makefiles...you don't have to know how to write them to be able to use
them.
Andrzej Jan Taramina
Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions
http://www.chaeron.com
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