Completely agree.  Ant works and doesn’t require you to write plugins just to 
customise the build process.

From: David <djohn...@start.ca>
Sent: 20 April 2021 23:04
To: Lisa Ruby <lbru...@protonmail.com>; users@netbeans.apache.org
Subject: Re: removing the "new project" support for Ant projects

+1!

On Tue, 2021-04-20 at 17:10 +0000, Lisa Ruby wrote:
For those of you who have used Maven for a long time it may seem simple and 
straightforward, but for those of us who haven't it's not. I've struggled to 
try and understand it and figure out how to use it for my software project and 
gave up. And it's a huge amount of overhead, extra disk space usage, and more 
bits and pieces to keep track of that isn't justifiable for small simple 
projects. ANT works just fine for me, and I will keep using it for as long as I 
possibly can. I need to focus my time on getting my software out, not on the 
tools I have to use to do it.

Lisa
On 4/20/2021 10:00 AM, Geertjan Wielenga wrote:
I agree, the Ant-based project creation should be removed and I disagree that 
there should be any kind of conversion between Ant and Maven -- that simply 
will never work and we'll spend the rest of our days fixing bugs in that. To 
convert from Ant to Maven: create a new Maven project and copy the Java source 
files from your Ant project into it.

Gj

On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 6:58 PM 
<pszud...@throwarock.com<mailto:pszud...@throwarock.com>> wrote:

Honestly, I think NB should have an internal conversation about removing the 
"new project" support for Ant projects, while still being able to open existing 
ones. It just confuses a lot of people if they're not going to be supported.


I agree, if and ONLY if you provide at least a rudimentary way to convert ANT 
projects to Maven projects.   I have been struggling with this issue too long.  
I have hundreds of Ant based projects that I would love to turn over 
immediately to Maven... but I can't , am struggling, and haven't coded a darn 
line in two months...  I used to code 10 hours a day ... and now... embarrassed 
by my inability to convert.,.

I exaggerate a bit, I still code in "Old" Netbeans 8.2, but I know the days are 
numbered...





On 2021-04-20 08:23, Will Hartung wrote:


On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 12:55 AM Wayne Gemmell | Connect 
<wa...@connect-mobile.co.za<mailto:wa...@connect-mobile.co.za>> wrote:
Is the perception that nobody does Maven EAR's anymore or that nobody uses 
EARs? I have a web app that has given me no shortage of issuse with ant.
I'm trying to move it to Maven. If nobody is using maven then I need to move to 
something else. If nobody is using EAR's anymore then I'm pretty stuck figuring 
out this Maven issue.


Well, it's several things.

EARs are less popular because their necessity has been greatly reduced. Session 
beans can be placed in WARs now, so for many use cases, a WAR is completely 
adequate to the task.

However, it's not suitable for all use cases.

Notably, MDBs can not be deployed in WARs. But only as an EJB either deployed 
standalone, or bundled within an EAR.

With the hue and cry over micro services and "down with the monolith", just the 
idea of a large application bundled in a EAR is falling out of favor.

Also, there's a history of advocacy underlying this. Sun used NetBeans as a 
mechanism to advocate for Java and Java EE. It behooved them to have something 
like NetBeans to make Java EE development easier. So, it was important for 
NetBeans to have really first class Java EE support. Bundling the Java EE 
wizards and templates along with Glassfish all helped promote that.

Of course, now, with the great Java Diaspora out of Oracle, the goals and 
drivers are different.

For your project, if all you have is a web app and some session beans, then a 
simple WAR file is good to go. The Ant projects seem to essentially be 
deprecated now, so I would not rely on those for anything. If practical, 
especially if your project is young, I would migrate it to Maven. The Maven WAR 
is a pretty simple project and seems to work ok. Maven isn't going away any 
time soon, Gradle, it's primary competitor, doesn't really have the traction to 
overcome it yet, and it's been going for some time. If nothing else, the 
pom.xml file has become a de facto portable project format if, for nothing 
else, to capture dependencies.

Honestly, I think NB should have an internal conversation about removing the 
"new project" support for Ant projects, while still being able to open existing 
ones. It just confuses a lot of people if they're not going to be supported.

And I still haven't heard any concrete position the project has on 
internalizing Maven archetypes used for project wizards, or the process of 
adopting that.

Legacy archetypes that used to work in NB 8 are now failing because they've 
vanished from Maven central. So, an external dependency broke an internal 
feature.

Feel free to follow up with specific questions about getting your project to 
work and/or converted to Maven.

Regards,

Will Hartung



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