Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] Two refactoring questions

[Roger W. <ro...@us...>]

2011/9/12 Frankie Fisher <jsy...@te...>:
> On 12/09/2011 14:01, Roger Westerlund wrote:
>>
>> I am not sure that Maven is the way to go for JSynthLib. I have been
>> using Maven in my work for the last couple of years and I have seen
>> Maven being bent over backwards to build a system. It is not a pretty
>> sight. I think nothing beats Maven when it comes to dependency
>> management and modularization but it is too easy to misuse Maven. I
>> would rather look for something like Gradle (http://www.gradle.org/)
>> when it comes to replacing Ant. I have not used it myself but I have
>> hear people saying good things about it (people smarter than me so I
>> trust them).
>
> Interesting, I'm only familiar with ant - what are the problems with ant?

For starters, it uses XML as it's "language" and XML was made for
machines to read so it is not the most human readable format available
(imho). Have a look at Gant (http://gant.codehaus.org/) which is based
on Ant to see the difference.

Ant scripts tends to grow wildly and if you don't fully understand Ant
then it is easy to start mixing target dependencies with antcalls and
then you have a problem.

You also have to do some backwards thinking to use conditional
triggering of targets. Something that is so easy to do in a
programming language with an if statement becomes really awkward in
Ant.

Also if you have a modularized application, which I would say that
JSynthLib should be, then the Ant build scripts you would need to
maintain would be quite some work.

I still think that Ant is a good tool if used properly but the XML
drags it down.

Regards,

Roger