[Xweb-developers] Re:Reactivating development

[Hendrik L. <hen...@gm...>]

Monday, November 10, 2003, 1:31:13 PM, you wrote:

> [redirected back to list, fully quoted]

Sometimes I forget to do a 'reply to all' :(

> The point I want to make is that Ant is a developers tool and that the

ACK. But building a web site _is_ development (its also programming in so=
me
kind), so why not using developer tools?

> XWeb integration needed in this context seems to be only the XWeb task=20
> for Ant. The frontend I imagine would be more for someone setting up a=20
> small website without many IT skills -- I suspect Webbuilder has a=20
> different target audience, also I think that audience is hard to target=
=20
> with a GUI.

A real good GUI fore XWeb would also handle some parts of Ant scripting
(e.g. for CVS or FTP access).

> Just look at how many people still code Java with vi or=20
> Emacs ;-) I never used much in terms of IDEs for C++, but with Java and=
=20
> Refactoring it is a bit different.

[OT]
Only in my early days I coded w/o a IDE. just because on the Commodores
these days they weren't this much...
But today the lack of a good IDE is a real problem for learing a new
language - such a thing can decide about being productive with a language
or not...

>>- I want to call a _single_ program/script, which should do everything:
>>  - generate project documentation in XML
> That should be covered, shouldn't it? I never really checked the Java

I mean this more like this:

- extract the documentation files from the project directory (this done b=
y
  ANT)
- maybe generate a 'web version' out of this (this is done by XWeb)
The documentation itself is plain text for the older projects, and XML fo=
r
the newer ones (and sometimes its LaTeX).

>>  - determine which files have been changed since the last run
> Does Ant give support for that?

No, not really. What I really want (and hopefully will write in the next
time) is a 3-way-diff:
- one source directory (with the generated web site)
- one compare directory (which contains an exact copy of the web site on =
the
  web server)
- a target directory, containing all changed data
This way I can always determine which files I need to copy to the web
server, w/o downloading all files everytime for comparision.

> I wonder if an Ant task for XWeb could return a <fileset> with the
> changes.

I would do this as an external task. Otherwise XWeb needs to know exactly
all the time about the content of the target web site.

>>  - optionally: delete old file from the website
> That's a tricky one. I wonder how much garbage due to renaming I have
> created in my webspaces by now. Sometimes I do a big cleanup.

Tha task mentioned above would also generate a "delete list" (e.g. a shel=
l
script or ANT project file) containing all files to be deleted, so it can
be done automtically.

hli
--=20
M=F8=F8se trained to mix concrete and                                 Hen=
drik Lipka
sign complicated insurance forms                           hendrik.lipka@=
gmx.de
                                                            www.hendrikli=
pka.de