This is from rational clearcase mailing list. it was forwarded to me by my clearcase admin. Thought it might be from interest.
--------- From: Franz, Paul Here is my experience with Ant at my company: 1) It is a great tool for developers, not the best for creating complex deployments. I have a set of Perl scripts and a makefile that does creates the daily builds. These builds are used by the developers to speed up their work and also used to create the directory structure that will be put on the CDs that will ship to the customers. (Note: By using Cygwin I am able to make sure that the build script can be used in both under NT and Solaris) 2) In Ant create a set of tasks in the build.xml that are the tasks that the developers need to do. Here the Ant-based environment is pretty simple. The tasks that are part of the current Ant-based enviroment are codegen (we have a process to generate EJBs and the like), compile and deploy_bean (runs ejbc possibly for multiple beans). This makes it easy on the developers and I keep the "old" way of building the daily build using the makefile and Perl Scripts. The reason I have for the separation is that developers do not create the deployments that get sent out to the customers therefore alot of the functionality that can be done in the makefile-based environment is not needed. One thing to keep in mind about Ant is that the dependency checking is pretty rudimentary (if you have not successfully compiled the source code). I have my daily build Perl Scripts analyze the source code and add dependencies based on the imports. (Note: To do create the Ant-based environment that is currently used. I had to create 13 new task definitions. Since some of the things I needed to do, like string manipulation, are not part of the core/optional tasks included with the Ant download) Paul Franz -----Original Message----- From: Warren Freeman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2001 9:56 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Switching over to Ant Recently the developers in our company have made a decision to replace the Perl scripts they were using in their local Windows NT/Windows 2000 development environments with an Ant-based interface which can perform a variety of tasks including: 1. Code extraction of selected code versions from ClearCase (we are using snapshot views) 2. Compilation of the code with Jikes 3. Running WebLogic ejbc to create the Enterprise Java Beans 4. Deployment of the resulting set of build files to one or more WebLogic instances running on the developers' local machines Now that we are using an Ant-based interface in the development environment, the developers would very much like to extend the Ant-based environment to go cross-platform and replace much of the rest of our formal build and deployment environment (which currently consists primarily of additional Perl scripts along with some Unix shell scripts running under Solaris 7). The developers feel that switching over to a cross-platform Ant-based environment would simplify our overall build environment and result in gains in productivity. In our company, we have an interop environment consisting of development platforms running under Windows NT/Windows 2000 and a formal build/deployment environment running under Solaris 7 which we use to perform our nightly builds and deploy our product code to multiple instances of WebLogic running on both Windows and Unix platforms. Our Company's product is Java-based, and our product uses a lot of XML, HTML and JSP code. If we are going to switch our formal build/deployment environment over to an Ant-based environment (which now appears to be pretty certain), I would certainly like to make the transition process go as smoothly as possible. I have looked through the CCIUG archives to get a sense of what people's experiences have been with using Ant (and specifically included some of the people who have posted on this topic in the CCIUG mailing list in my "To" list -- I hope that is alright), and I have looked at and downloaded a lot of information on Ant from http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/. I have two questions: 1. Given our current build environment and the type of product that we are building, and knowing that there are other tools out there that we could have used including clearmake, Gnu make and cook, is switching to Ant the best decision we could have made? 2. If we proceed with this transition to an Ant-based environment (which seems pretty certain at this point), what is the best way to go about it so that it can be done as smoothly as possible and so that we can get the greatest befit from it?' As much as possible, I would like to draw from other people's experiences using Ant so as not to repeat any unnecessary mistakes and so as to get the maximum benefit from using Ant as quickly as possible. Any words of advice or references to additional good sources of information would be gratefully appreciated. TIA, Warren Freeman Software Configuration Manager Vendavo Corporation 650-213-0464 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
