>Ant is basically an automation system, that can automate the creation of
>dists, jars, setting classpaths, etc. It's the most common build system
>in Java.
>
>If you have a project with source tree and libs, you need to still add
>them to the classpath. With ant it's just "ant", and it's so in
>Jbuilder, Eclipse, Netbeans, Jedit, Jext, etc.
Yes, it is an automation tool. And, just like CPP is an automation tool, ant
can be abused to do configuration management because it's possible. The
postgresql dist includes the use of Ant for no reason at all. The build
process is stricktly Linux/Make based, and Ant is not necessary when Make is
already in place.
My IDE includes the ability to do all the things that Ant does, so I don't
need to use Ant for my projects. Running unit tests and other such tasks is a
good use for running these tests portably.
The Ant task in postgresql does textual substitutions into the .java source
files before building. The same things can be done at runtime with
properties. I just want to make sure that complexity is only a necessity, not
a chain reaction.
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gr...@cy... (Cyte Technologies Inc)
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