Hey folks -- Again, I'm really not looking for the concrete solution, more interested in discussion of "why" folks would choose different approaches. More pyschology than computer science ;-)
I could write something in perl. EriK, god that he is, can do perl or ruby or probably a dozen other langs, and of couse ant too (hmmm, wonder why he didn't mention that option ;-) Jim and Duffy and Robert obviously prefer a 'Nix shell, based on their understanding of the req'ts which were intentially sketchy and didn't note that the platform must run on WinXP without Cygwin. ;-) > Of course, as pointed out, it all depends on what you're comfortable with. I think Robert sums it up there -- seems "familiarity" is the main motivator for tool selection -- after ruling things out based on req'ts. (ex. scp goes out the window if ONLY http access allowed. wget -m falls down, I think, if the http directory isn't browseable) The interesting discussion (no right/wrong here) is what to recommend for a developer who doesn't already have a tool familiarity to fall back on. I could recommend Perl, but I don't know for sure that something I don't know about (ex. beanshell) might not be a better option for somebody without my specific background. I'm trying to think outside of my own world here... but I think we've seen that it's hard to compare, especially when qualities like "more readable" are subjective and variable depending on recent experience. (the SH scripting is fresh in my mind, but in 6 months, who knows how much retention I'll have of that -- and ruby might be more familiar by then) TR made a great point by saying he'd recommend something he's willing to teach. That makes perfect sense (and also is a logical reason that the "familiar" lives on.) > [Duffy] Ok, so barring that, I think this seems a perfect use > of a scripting language - either perl or any of the various *sh variants. > In terms of professional development I'd say everyone > should have some scripting language under their belt. > ... send a Perl book... or a printout of 'man bash' With all the recent hype around Java & scripting... it's interesting that most of the suggestions seem to fall back to Perl/Sh -- nobody has suggested something like Groovy or beanshell. -Timo --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
