Comments on: 12 paths to build.xml nirvana

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 09:08:17 +0000

Oh, by the way. In case you were wondering. Ant sucks. Makefiles not portable? Gee, I guess 10,000 sourceforge, GNU, and Perl projects are all wrong. Gee, isn’t it funny how all those things compile on every platform known to mankind? Without requiring Sun’s f’ing gazillion megabyte downloads. So you can write bogus xml scripts that make doing something simple like `ls *.java | sed -e ‘s/blah/blahblah/gi’ | my_cool_jcpp –enable-include –enable-defines –enable-java-as-a-real-language-instead-of-an-irritation` almost impossible to do.

Ah, yes, Ant. What a great tool–not.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:29:56 +0000

For those complaining about no IF or LOOP statements in Ant, checkout the ant-contrib projects at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ant-contrib. Download the .jar file for the latest recommended release, drop it in your ant/lib folder, add one line to the top of your build scripts, and you can IF and LOOP ’till your heart’s content. There are also alot of other nice features in the ant-contrib project that you can use to enhance your Ant builds.

By: TX

TX — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 16:18:04 +0000

Hmm… while launching from build.xml _is_ bad, I use it to generate shell scripts for the actual launching at the moment. That comes in rather handy, particularly because changing a dependent JAR file at some time during development results in the launcher scripts being rewritten. Of course you can do this with a ‘for’ statement in bash, but on Windows it’s not quite the same ease. :-)

By: lerezz

lerezz — Tue, 25 Nov 2003 01:16:42 +0000

I’d like to add sth. to point number 6 talking about -projecthelp: even if this option could be helpfully, you find it was once at the beginning written and nobody took care of mantaining its information … so never trust a projecthelp information!

By: crobert

crobert — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 06:55:36 +0000

Hey, it’s very ease to abuse things in general (and software in particular). The point is that ant works and does its job. If it doesn’t work as you might want it to, you have the source code and you’re free to change it.

Especially with open source software, one should “Use it, not abuse it” and should not expect it to do out-of-the-box things that commercial applications don’t even do.

By: Run

Run — Sun, 02 Nov 2003 17:02:16 +0000

I use run tasks for two reasons.
1 – Frequently I’m helping C++ coders move to Java. I prototype some stuff for them and ship it off. Who knows what OS they’re going to us. I just want them to see my code and run it (helps squash the enevitable C++ diehard from having another complaint).
2 – On those rare occaisions I touch a Windows box I use Cygwin. I can’t for the life of me get classpaths right. Ant does.

By: Micke

Micke — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 12:16:24 +0000

For those that want best practices the ant resource page (http://ant.apache.org/resources.html) is a good place to start.

In particular the “Ant in Anger” paper should be required reading for everyone writing an ant ant file.

By: Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 11:49:54 +0000

I am using ant to write my poetry in a word plugin.

By: Howard M. Lewis Ship

Howard M. Lewis Ship — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 08:22:51 +0000

I don’t see Ant as, specifically, a build system. It is adept at building, but I do think it is very useful for just running applications as well. Not your everyday applications, but (for example), getting WebLogic up and running.

Perhaps this is just a bile against WebLogic and the massive complexity of their startup command line … but you can end up with a horrendously complicated, unmaintainable startup script … or you can use Ant to build a complex startup classpath and command line.

Some people complain about Ant syntax (or XML syntax) … but it sure beats shell script and Windows batch files!

I’d say most of the abuses you posted are the result of the wrong people being assigned to build the Ant build scripts; the folks who approach engineering as a kind of magical incantation … cutting, pasting and tweaking until it works. Like anything else, it’s better to have deeper understanding of the issues (such as the fact that projects get more complex over time and the build files need to keep up, or that different users may want to build in different directories on different O/Ses).

By: Anu

Anu — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 01:40:18 +0000

Who thinks ANT is a scripting language?
Its a build system DUH!

Theres some crap in the list, probably 50-50, so not too bad an effort …

By: grumpy

grumpy — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 18:52:20 +0000

Dude I am working with an inherited system that follows every single point. Cool eh?

Nice post.

Oh yeah, and, ant sucks.

By: jkl;lkj

jkl;lkj — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 17:30:38 +0000

klklk

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 16:23:51 +0000

As an ant newbie, I didn’t know that this post was sarcastic until about half-way through. It would be awesome if you could post a quick best practices for people like me….

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 15:02:37 +0000

ANT needs to define the tasks as interfaces and simply deliver the script as a Java class/source doing stuff against the interfaces. Why do people have to express things in XML when expressing them in Java is clearly better?

XML is retarded if used for anything else than documents or configs.

By: Kangawallafox

Kangawallafox — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 14:03:07 +0000

Dear Mr David Dumbass,

>> You can’t always tunnel everything through a proxy

Thats an astute observation!

But http does remarkably well…

By: The Real Dave

The Real Dave — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:28:33 +0000

Dear Mr. Proxy dumbass: You can’t always tunnel everything through a proxy. A proper distribution should list the dependancies and versions, and provide you with a “here’s everything” archive as well as a “here’s nothing” archive leaving it up to you to get them yourself (in case you already have them.

And to the rest of you: Ant sucks ass. It is the worst scripting language ever written (no fucking if statement or proper loop???) You just like it because it’s XML. make is far superior. Jesus java `find . -name \*.java -print` is better.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:13:34 +0000

I have seen all of these, even perpetrating a few of them before I knew what I was doing. That said, the really amazing thing about this list is that there are so few ways to make bad Ant build files. To a surprising extent, Ant Just Works, solving build problems with efficiency and grace.

One more –

13 – In your “java” and “exec” tasks, liberally use “arg line = ‘…’” rather than “arg value = ‘…’” or “arg file = ‘…’”.
Do this especially for arguments that are file names or paths. This allows you to reintroduce the subtle OS, shell, and file naming dependencies that were so beloved from pre-Ant build systems.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:03:23 +0000

One more –

By: HappyPappy

HappyPappy — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:25:25 +0000

Could you repost this article by inverting all the 12 paths pls.

Thanks,

Happy

By: Kangawallafox

Kangawallafox — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 10:53:27 +0000

>> Never ship dependent jars

Or better yet, ship them every jar on your system – why not a snapshot of your development environment and make them download 190+Meg.

Personally I prefer http get… – and whats more, I am manly enough to work out how to use these crazy new fangled inventions called “Proxies” from behind corporate firewalls. Some “Proxies” even handle NTLM authentication.

-Pippy Long Stocking