Re: please help me get started with building a website
On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Thufir wrote:
On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:58:47 +0100, Tom Anderson wrote:
It's possible to do much or all of that portably - ant was made to do
this (more or less), and what you can't do in ant, you can do in java
(perhaps by writing an ant task).
There are other build scripts besides ant, most notably maven.
Maven's not an alternative to ant, AIUI, it's more of a wrapper - it does
a lot of standardised donkey work (fetching dependencies, compiling,
building JARs, running tests etc) for you, as long as you submit to its
rules for laying out packages, but if you want to do something that isn't
standardised donkey work (and i'm not certain how far that goes, but i
think things like loading databases, starting app servers etc are not
covered), you're back to writing your own ant job.
In java, there's groovy. I've used ruby & rake, and there are a variety
of java build projects based upon ruby and rake which simplify things.
Would any of those solve that problem, I wonder?
Yes, if you're willing to use one of those. I would absolutely love to
move our build process over to groovy (and gant, which is a groovy API to
ant's tasks, which are themselves often pretty useful), but that would
involve adding a new language to the project - a language which nobody in
our office knows, and which our clients don't know (so far, at least). At
least with the bash-ant-java hybrid we have at the moment, when we hand a
system over to a client they have a hope in hell of understanding it based
on their existing knowledge.
Yes, groovy is easy to learn. But that doesn't really matter, because when
a project manager or a less-inquisitive developer sees the bullet point
that says 'build system written in groovy', they go ballistic.
That's the argument that's stopped us moving to groovy so far, anyway.
There is a faction here which does not believe it, and continues to
agitate for groovy, but so far he hasn't won out.
tom
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