ANT for prod deployment

Presently, our production deployment is done using a jacl script. Apart from deployment, the jacl script also has functions to start cluster(s), stop cluster(s), restart cluster(s), check cluster status, check server status, stop app, start app, check app status etc.

My company had me researching on using ANT. What would be compelling reasons to use ANT in place of the existing jacl script? I have researched on the web and found some lukewarm arguments.

Forgot to mention we use WebSphere 5

Well I am using ant for Production and I cant say enough good things about it. It is great tool. Easy to use. Integrated into websphere....
Take a second look

What are arguments for jacl?

From: Henrik Sjostrand
Subject: Re: Using ANT for production deployment
Newsgroups: ibm.software.websphere.application-server
Date: 2004-06-04 11:40:43 PST

subkat wrote in message news:<91e6fa21.0406031150.60e9c27@posting.google.com>...
> Presently, our production deployment is done using a jacl script.
> Apart from deployment, the jacl script also has functions to start
> cluster(s), stop cluster(s), restart cluster(s), check cluster status,
> check server status, stop app, start app, check app status etc.
>
> My company had me researching on using ANT. What would be compelling
> reasons to use ANT in place of the existing jacl script? I have
> researched on the web and found some lukewarm arguments.

I'd say stick with your existing, working, JACL scripts and use ANT
for your Java build process. Sure you can use ANT also for controlling
WebSphere, but I prefer to use JACL (wscp/wsadmin) for this.

ANT is not a scripting language, it's a declarative language which is
very suitable for the build process. But in the deployment process I
see the advantages of using a scripting language with things like
conditional statements etc.

Some people will argue and say that you can use ANT for both build and
deployment and, of course, you can. And ANT can also handle
conditional statements but not as easy as JACL. One advantage of using
ANT instead of JACL, however, would be that you only have one tool and
syntax to learn to control both processes.

/Henrik Sj�strand

One of my favorite quotes...

Synergy means behaviour of whole systems unpredicted
by the behaviour of their parts. -- Buckminster Fuller

ANT is a fantastic tool for automating tasks.
wsadmin and JACL are indispensible for WAS administration; I've even seen Mr. Kyle Brown post here to the effect that "it is the ONLY way to go".

Consider combining the two--use ANT to launch wsadmin and your JACL script.
Build, deliver, deploy, install, and restart. All at once. No need to throw anything away or recreate.

It's just another automated step. How can you lose?