By: Cliff

Cliff — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:27:31 +0000

Interestingly enough I left Ivy and fell in love with M2 almost a year ago. The thing that’s missing from Ant and Ivy is the “build system”. They are both excellent tools with which you can use to write a build system but who wants yet another project to maintain? Many developers don’t realize that a build system is a prject in and of itself, and a downright complicated one. It needs to be maintained just as much as the project it builds. I’ve been keeping my eye on GAnt (actually I’ve taken my eye off of it for about a month but I’m going to look again). The point is that I don’t want to write or maintain another build system again. That is where projects like Maven2, Equinox, Rails, Grails and Appfuse shine. They come with a build system included. What would be really nice would be an build system, based on Ant/Ivy with a friendlier extension mechanism and interface than Maven2. In other words, I’d like to be able to say, “create java-project” or “create web-project” and then say “install” or “deploy” without writing a single line of build logic. I’d then like to be able to do things like skip my unit tests on a particular iteration without having to refer to the docs. I’d then like to be able to tweak one of the build system plugins or create a plugin as easily as I can with tweak or create an Ant task. I’m asking for the best of both worlds. I want my cake and eat it too. (Why are you eating my cake? Can I get a fork?) Can somebody please make a build system for Java with Ant/Ivy that’s not hard-wired to a web framework?Ya’ feelin’ me?

Comments on: Ivy has lots of potential

By: Cliff