At 12:22 PM 6/8/01 -0500, Lance Hankins wrote: >Now I'm getting pushback from the management and CM organizations because they don't >want to use Ant (my perception on this is that they don't really know what Ant is, >aside from a "replacement for Make"). They've made statements like they don't >want to use Ant because its "free and not supported". They are decreeing that >everyone shall use Make.
Which make? Almost all the decent makes are "free and not supported" aswell I believe ;) >My questions : > * Do any of you have any advice on how to wage this argument (aside from "Ant is cross platform, make is not")...? * speed of development. Most makefile 'experts' can not get anywhere neer the speed of ant for java projects. It is not uncommon for make process to take 10 times long or more. * existing support. There is already a lot of existing suppport for J2EE type tasks. This is only going to increase as time goes by. There is probably no equivelent to some of this functionality in make. * simplicity. In most cases it is easier to maintain build files and keep user setting outside generic build process. >* Ant has a lot of built in support for Java and J2EE based builds, how effective is it at building C++ based stuff (particularly with large CORBA based systems). We have a very heterogeneous environment here (C++ systems, CORBA/C++ systems, CORBA/Java systems, J2EE based systems, etc). Ant *could* be made to work with native systems (ie write java tasks to wrap compilers etc) however it currently is not well suited to this task. I wouldn't recomend it (unless you were willing to write the tasks). I would maybe use a mixed approach with make for native generation, compiles and linking but use ant for the j2ee/java specific stuff. Cheers, Pete *-----------------------------------------------------* | "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, | | and proving that there is no need to do so - almost | | everyone gets busy on the proof." | | - John Kenneth Galbraith | *-----------------------------------------------------*
