I’ve always been a fan of Anthill. I feel a certain affinity to that company since formicary basically means anthill in Latin. So despite hearing many people complain about it, I thought I’d give it a fair chance at proving everyone wrong.
The first steps were very promising. I asked them for a free opensource license for the pro version for opensymphony and was given one within a few hours. A quick look through the mailing list showed that they respond to pretty much every single question with long thoughtful polite responses. The level of support they provide makes one tingle all over in that pleasurable way that borders on the sinful.
Alas, they’re cursed by one small problem; the product itself. Sadly, it sucks ass. It has a number of very serious flaws that make using it a distinct displeasure.
First, the user interface. It’s awkward and clunky. It only works in IE, and even then a breakage is not surprising. It violates any number of user interface guidelines that decent people everywhere have learnt to abide by. For example, let’s say you have a detail page telling you you’re using ant. Now, instead of having a nice big fat ‘configure’ button next to it, the ‘ant’ word is hyperlinked. This takes you to the ant configuration page. This approach just feels hugely counterintuitive and obstuse.
The tree itself seems to have grown organically (ie, it’s an illogical mess), rather than been properly designed. Finding a particular node is a matter of wild and furious clicking around rather than logical deduction.
Sadly, this ugliness is not merely skin deep. It merely hides further ugliness on the inside. For example, everything is implemented as a module. Modules are a mixture of java code and ‘pagelets’. A pagelet is a jsp-like source file that is compiled to a java class by an anthill compiler. Byebye quick and easy preview for page modifications. What’s so evil about jsp, velocity, or pretty much any other templating system that doesn’t require pre-compilation?
Then there’s the configuration mess. The conf directory is bewildering variety of config xml files. Every module delights in spitting out any number of these. It’s pretty much impossible to figure out what goes where, or how to change an actual setting.
The actual build functionality works as advertised, I just wish they’d focus on that rather than on providing pointless features like a file browser or an ‘intranet’ publish area. Since you’re deploying the product into a servlet container, it’s trivial to create a separate webapp that will house your artifacts. It also removes the burden from anthill and allows them to focus on stuff they do know how to do (build systems) rather than stuff they don’t know how to do (ui, file serving, configuration management, etc etc).
However, given the stellar support and great attitude the company has, it’s surprisingly easy to forgive the minor quibble of a bad product they’re selling. Just goes to show that there’s a lot more to success than a good product!
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November 3rd, 2003 at 3:05 pm
Service is king. It doesn’t matter if you are selling polished turds in a box as long as the service is great. It’s what American capitalism is founded on. Crappy product and low quality served with a nice doily, a smile, and a high retail price tag. Either buy the polished turd or jump onboard a start making those doilys.
November 3rd, 2003 at 4:02 pm
Wow, and you missed how well AHPro misinteroperates with PVCS. You must be using a less benighted version control system.
November 3rd, 2003 at 5:05 pm
You are talking out of your arse. It works absolutely fine in Mozilla and Firebird. And yes, PVCS blows chunks, but AHPro seems to manage with it ok. We live by it.
November 4th, 2003 at 3:57 am
I am using the OS version, and it works just fine in a recent Netscape.
The service even for the OS product is first class – responses to the mailing list are prompt, to the point and avoid “RTFM” even for requests that so clearly beg for it.
There are some niggles though – the default log level is too low when you’re struggling with build failures, which can send you on wild goose chases. In my case, a missing entry in the classpath for the ant execution showed up as some nonsense with CVS permissions using the default “INFO” log level.
I don’t mind the interface much, but then my UI skills stink.
November 4th, 2003 at 7:08 am
“sucks ass” is unnecessary, offensive, and poor English. And untrue.
We use the product (several licenses in fact) in all facets of our development, qa, and production build and deployment. Yes, it could use some refining touches, but the product does just as advertised and does it admirably.
I disagree with the “pointless features” and “write it yourself” comments about the publishing system. These are invaluable tools that integrate directly into the entire system from source checkout to email notification. I do not want to write my own web site to manage versioned, multi-project log viewing. And AnthillPro’s implementation is adequate for most user’s need.
With that said, we did need to write our own Build Notifier to publish some additional information to another web site beyond the built-in publisher. The hooks are easy to use, albeit undocumented (you need email support to figure it out).
As far as version control system go, PVCS has several weaknesses that make it a poor system to use with AnthillPro. This is not AnthillPro’s fault. Please speak with Merant about some of it’s limitations, I have. On the other hand, Visual SourceSafe and CVS works just fine with AnthillPro.
Overall I am very pleased with the product and would recommend it to any team or department looking for continuous integration and a refined, process-driven build process.
November 4th, 2003 at 11:51 am
With all due respect to Mr. Whitehead, AHPro does not interoperate well with PVCS when using version labels. When AHPro tries to get a particular version label on a file where that version label does not exist, AHPro errors out. This is normally a warning on a standard Ant PVCS target, but AHPro decides to die on this minor warning. We’ve contacted urbansoftward and they’re working on a fix.
November 4th, 2003 at 12:53 pm
I’ve had good luck with CruiseControl, once I got around the total lack of documentation. But quite frankly, I find the availablility of even sucky products to be better than not having them at all. In fact, the nice thing about having a sucky product is that it inspires people to write something better much more effectively than simply building the good product from the ground up. If that makes any sense.
November 5th, 2003 at 3:38 pm
I don’t know why people are commenting so negatively about what seemed to me to be a glowing and positive review (for here)!
November 6th, 2003 at 11:56 am
I once had a magnifying glass and was burning all the ants on the anthill. It was good fun, maybe a little evil.
December 12th, 2003 at 5:54 am
I’ve been using AntHillSO at my job has some time, and agree with the fast answers at mailing list. At least at SO version (maybe because it hasn’t so many features) the UI is not so anti-guidelines as hani says. The publishing stuff hani’s prefere to do in his own, I too doesn’t miss too much. With just a especific target (called anthill) in my build’s.xml, I create a version number directory under publish’s directory and copies there everything I need to store. The default behaviour (it has some time I don’t update it) is to store just the ant log (I think the cvs change log is stored too) for each project, so you need some tasks to share the unit tests, executable artifacts and javadoc, just to say some. I just think that AnthillSO is not so focused by the anthill developers, since urbancode gets money from the pro version (a kind of good money: $1.299), so it’s hard to depend on a tool that each new feature developed for it competes with the tool that the same developers live from.
April 28th, 2005 at 9:49 pm
For source control go with Evolution by ionForge. Free single-seat and trial multi-seat licenses at http://www.ionforge.com