<forwarded to group in case anyone is interested>
Hi Ernst,
> However, I find ant less powerful than make, because with the
> Makefile I am building I just have to change the name of the application
> and the names of the beans in order to get a new makefile for a different
> EJB application.
I would contend that Ant can be as powerful as you can be bothered to make
it - you can write your own Tasks and there are plenty of helper classes
available.
Case in point: the Task I wrote to generate the ejb-jar.xml needs only to
be told where the application package root is - I don't even specify the
names or types of the EJBs.
It enumerates over the classes in the application, loading classes up, and
using reflection to tell what they are, before spitting out the appropriate
XML.
> Although ant seems very nice at first glance, I don't
> think it is powerful enough. What I am missing is `patsubst'
> functionality. It may be in there, but I haven't found it yet. /:)
There's regexp (http://jakarta.apache.org/regexp/index.html) if you want to
pattern match generally, and if you want to apply some algorithm to a
certain subset of files in a hierarchy, then the DirectoryScanner class in
the ant package hierarchy is a good bet.
Regards,
James Dodd
ZDNet
