It is precisely because you want to focus on getting your software
out that you *need* to learn the modern tools for doing so. Your
Gradle project file could literally be one line, depending on your
needs. Maven is certainly more verbose (My preference is Gradle),
but the project setup is still usually a single command that will
write a basic pom.xml file for you. Either of those tools is a step
up. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending you can stick with
Ant forever is not the way to go. I get that “it works for you now”.
But this discussion is a perfect example of how that will change on you.
Actually, I have always been of the philosophy that "if it ain't broke,
don't fix it." This seems to be a philosophy lost in today's modern
world. Your comments show your bias toward always being on the bleeding
edge of technology. Personally, I do not care what anyone chooses to use
for a build tool or a programming language. What gets to me is that
someone (or group of someones) somewhere decides that a certain
technology is "too old", so they are wanting to kill it. It does not
seem to matter that there are hundreds, thousands, or millions of people
who use that specific technology throughout the world. They just decide
it needs to be killed and everyone should just get on-board with their
decision.
Explain to me, Scott, why I **need** to learn Maven and dump Ant. Ant
has served me very well all of these years and has never given me one
single bit of trouble. Speed? Ant is fast enough for me and my projects.
Keeping libraries "up-to-date"? That is just another way of saying "stay
on the bleeding edge." Why should I learn Maven and dump Ant? Explain it
with facts and reasoning, and without resorting to expressions such as
"sticking your head in the sand."
Let me give you one of my many experiences with Maven. I downloaded some
sample code today to see how someone was using a particular library. It
turned out that sample code was in a NB Maven project. I opened that
project at around 20:00, I just closed NB about 20 minutes ago. The
whole time, Maven was doing something, supposedly in the background, but
it had my CPUs up at 68% use and my memory at 82%. I have a Quadcore
providing 8 threads and 8 GiB of RAM. There is absolutely no reason that
Maven should have been pegging my system out like that for the simple
little project that I had opened. Ant certainly never does that to my
system.
To me, it seems that more people are drawn to Maven because it tries to
take care of library management for you. However, any developer worth
their salt believes on managing that kind of thing by themselves. I have
been programming since 1983 and remember the days when a compiler was an
actual person who gathered shared libraries from various locations and
manually linked them to your application, so that your application would
work properly. I do not shun all advances in technology, but when
something is as stable and useful as Ant, I just don't get why some
people just want it gone. I use automation systems whenever they make
sense for me. A lot of things, I would rather take care of myself so
that I can be sure the stuff is the way I planned it and want it. Old
school, I know, but I am who I am...
-SC
