Hi all,
>
> > Also, I just need this in order to start benchmarking my and my teams
> > work.
> >
> > WHat is the standard amount of time you would expect a neophyte to take
> > to finish off a build subystem creation/conversion project for a
> > multi-tiered application of say 2000 class files and a total of
> > 6000 files ?
>
> I don't think I can really give you an answer to this one, since I don't
> think it's so much a question of how many files are involved, but more a
> matter of the complexity of what's needed for the particular build
> process.
I can share with you my experiences. For background, I've been writing
software for 14 years, mostly in Unix environments, always with good
"engineering" principles (unit test frameworks, development environments,
etc, etc) I've lived and breathed make and know it backwards. I have
build a java development environment framework using make in a past life,
so I've got a good handle on how to do these things.
I'm involved in a Java crypto project (www.bouncycastle.org) that has
about 600 java files that get packaged into 9 releases complete with
javadoc and source. The motivation is to get a cross-platform compilation
environment for BouncyCastle, so it has to deal with that.
The releases are all "different" in some way, and are targeted towards
JDK1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.3/MIDP. So, you could say it's fairly
complex in the creation environment.
I had not had much experience with Ant prior to undertaking this task,
other than using it in small environments (simple builds of J2ME projects)
to get up to speed and learn some strategies.
It's taken about 8-16 hours of actual work to do the conversion, of which
about 4 hours has been planning how I was going to do it, factoring out
the common blocks and devising sensible options.
If I was using make I could have done it in about 2. Ant does _not_ deal
well with conditional things which is what my environment is all about and
the relatively weak documentation makes it even harder. This mailing list
is the only thing that has made my use of Ant possible.
At work we're developing a number of n-tier (JSP, Servlet, EJB) apps that
are deployed to Weblogic. We do JSPC, and 2 types of deployment for the
JSP/Servlet tier (WAR & flat). This uses the ejbjar tasks and works great.
Took about 6 hours to analyse and design, about 16 hours to implement.
It's working really well.
So, "a couple of days" seems to be a good benchmark. ;-)
Cheers,
-- jon
