Re: Ant vs Maven [Was: Building 3.0 from trunk]

From: Aristedes Maniatis (ar..sh.com.au)
Date: Sun Feb 25 2007 - 22:32:03 EST

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    On 26/02/2007, at 12:55 AM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:

    > * We joined the club of gullible people who bought into the Maven
    > hype (I thought such thing would never happen to me :-)), so now we
    > have a common (though crappy) platform for integration of the code
    > from different projects up and down stream. I remember how much
    > pain it was to create Maven artifacts out of Ant Cayenne in the past.

    Is it that important? Surely we want to be able to make clear
    decisions about when we want to import a new version of a jar into
    Cayenne. We import that file, test appropriately, then commit when
    ready. As for downstream - do we care that much? I'd be surprised if
    many people were relying on these artifacts. Anyway, there may be
    ways to do this from ant now:

    http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks.html

    > * Maven popularity leaves some (if not much) hope that it will be
    > fixed someday. (OT: believe it or not, even WebObjects developers
    > are considering Maven these days!!!)

    Maybe maven will improve. Or maybe its problems are so structural
    that it will just be tweaked around the edges and more features added
    to it. Maybe the problem is that (like ant) it is trying to use XML
    as a programming/scripting language and failing. But unlike ant, you
    end up with an XML file nested 25 levels deep and quite
    incomprehensible. I've never understood why the build script is a
    good place to keep the timezone in which each developer lives.

    > * The project structure indeed became more organized than it was
    > before.

    Maybe, but that can be done with ant as well.

    > * As the number of modules grows, the ability to build them one-by-
    > one becomes more important. You can do it with Maven, we couldn't
    > do it with the old Ant based system.

    But it is possible. Different ant build.xml files or different
    targets within one file.

    If ant was to be used again, I'd be happy to donate any parts of our
    ant scripts (to do things like build .dmg, integrate subversion build
    numbers into the manifest, etc) which we use here internally. Some
    parts might be useful.

    Ari Maniatis

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