Reinhard Poetz wrote: >
As you can see, my vision has nothing to do with Maven, Ant or any other build tool. Personally, I like Ant more because *I* understand it and I know exactly what it is doing. *My* personal experience is, that whenever I used Maven, I ran into problems and it took me ages to get things going. Probably my personal stupidity :-) Two other reason for me : Since Ant 1.6 reusability (import and macro) is possible (it's not true any more that you have to write your Ant scripts over and over again)
:-) And for sure you need to write it once and build an infrastructure around it to enable all other project to use it etc., etc. So you are at the same stage as with our current build system right now. Maven has already solved lots of this by tons of plugins but I cannot see an commonly available repository of Ant include/macro stuff.
Unfortunatly this is not available (yet) :-(
and that nearly everybody is able to read and write Ant himself.
Which is your personal oppinion. But this might be true just for the more involved Cocoon developers.
Of course, this is *my* impression derived from my experiences in this community, other opensource and commercial projects. Although I have to admit that the interest in Maven is increasing.
Hence I went for Ant. Writing an XSLT that transforms the block.xml into an Ant script wasn't very difficult and the best solution *for me*.
If somebody can show a (better?/another) solution using Maven, we have a whiteboard. It can be used to setup the ideal environment for Maven and we can decide whether we think the required changes are good or not. The only requirement I have is, that block.xml should be used to drive the build but it was shown that this isn't a problem at all.
Well, actually the endless discussion about alternate build and management tools made many of us just giving up and starting it in their own little world instead of cooperatively developing such a system (so this is my personal oppinion).
I know this feeling - if I had discussed the development of the block-builder I wouldn't have written a single line of code. In the meantime its up and running (with some minor issues that I'm going to fix the next few hours)
I should keep my mounth shut as this has the potential to starts another long thread about it and I'm one of the tired guys discussing it over and over again (but at times I cannot resist ;-), I'm sorry).
;-)
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Reinhard Pötz Independant Consultant, Trainer & (IT)-Coach
{Software Engineering, Open Source, Web Applications, Apache Cocoon}web(log): http://www.poetz.cc --------------------------------------------------------------------
