I can offer the same testament as Christopher. Now, I do have a good amount of Ruby experience, but I think the tutorialization on the Buildr site is excellent, and will probably get you through most of your common tasks. I use the API docs (I THINK they are a little stale, am I wrong here? If they are, this is something I'd like to help update as we're investing in Buildr) and they provide helpful information.
The few times where I felt there was info missing from the doc, I was able to get into the source code and figure things out fairly quickly. For instance, by default Buildr will import JMock and Hamcrest if you're using JUnit as your testing framework. My particular project unfortunately has to target the Java 1.4.2 runtime, so I was able to see how to write a custom test framework class that just includes the JUnit 3 jar. If you're new to Ruby, it certainly might not be the most efficient to read through source code to figure out the more esoteric tasks, but I think learning a bit of Ruby will go a long way since Buildr is pure Ruby beyond it's core DSL. Overall, I'm super happy that we dropped Maven and went to Buildr. On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 12:40 PM, Christopher Tiwald <[email protected]>wrote: > Hey Olivier, > > For what it's worth, I was able to convert our 2908 lines of xml in a dozen > different poms into a 169-line buildfile. Took about a workday. About 100 of > those lines are dependencies and I have about as much Ruby experience as a > bored college freshman who "checked it out" that weekend the Team Fortress 2 > servers crashed. > > The docs and examples on buildr.apache.org were pretty much all I needed. > Dug into the API docs for a method call or two but our software's > architecture makes Jackson Pollack look well-organized. For straightforward > project management, buildr was an absolute breeze. So easy, in fact, I > thought I was doing it wrong. I'm going to blame maven for that. > > -- > Christopher > > On Jul 7, 2011, at 1:33 PM, Olivier Lefevre wrote: > > >> I recommend you try out things and ask questions -- a good way to learn > (IMO) > >> though not necessarily the easiest. > > > > Asking lots of questions (possibly silly ones) in public in an age where > employers, > > colleagues, customers or various firms and software programs deputized by > the > > above routinely trawl public fora to compile your profile an decide > whether you're > > a dunce is not an appealing proposition. Once upon a time it might have > been OK > > but this is the age of zero privacy, invasive searches and real-time > violation. This > > makes good docs more important than ever. > > > > -- O.L. > >
