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Limit of ant

 
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Someone tell me about Ant, ant can do anything. (All command in OS, tool .. etc)

So, What are limit of ANT ?
 
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One limitation that is often discovered for builds of very large, complex projects is that Ant is not a programming/scripting language. Martin Fowler is one person who has written about this issue. Nevertheless, Ant has become the standard build tool for many, many projects of varying sizes.

Craig
[ September 22, 2004: Message edited by: Craig Demyanovich ]
 
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I'm not sure how to quantify what Ant can do in terms of operating system commands other than to point to the list of core tasks in Ant 1.6:

http://ant.apache.org/manual/coretasklist.html

And then there are the optional tasks:

http://ant.apache.org/manual/optionaltasklist.html

Where I've seen Ant break down is when it's used as a scripting language. When that happens, I've been encouraged by what can be done when Groovy and Ant are used together. The angle brackets go away and you end up with the full power of Java and all the Ant tasks available programmatically. I show an brief example of that in the book. The Groovy web site gives a brief explanation, as well:

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Ant+Scripting

I've also seen Ant build files grow to the point of being unmaintainable. Often this can be managed by better use of common properties and targets to reduce duplication. Breaking large build files into separate, smaller build files can also help. Ant 1.6 includes new features such as build file inheritance and macros that can help manage the size and complexity of unwieldy Ant build files.

Mike
[ September 22, 2004: Message edited by: Mike Clark ]
 
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Ant 1.6 includes new features such as build file inheritance and macros



Cool! I've been using 1.5 and didn't know that 1.6 had introduced such longed-for facilities. Time to visit http://ant.apache.org/ and do some reading!
 
Mike Clark
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Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
Cool! I've been using 1.5 and didn't know that 1.6 had introduced such longed-for facilities. Time to visit http://ant.apache.org/ and do some reading!



I found this short article to be helpful in groking the new features:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/bodewig_ant1.6.html

Mike
 
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Originally posted by Mike Clark:
I've also seen Ant build files grow to the point of being unmaintainable.



One thing I have learned in the three years of being the "build master" on our project is that a build script needs as much care as any other code - you need to take it clean, refactor it, remove duplication etc. Unfortunately, the available tools aren't as powerfull as those for Java in this regard...

Ant 1.6 includes new features such as build file inheritance and macros that can help manage the size and complexity of unwieldy Ant build files.



And the use of macros (instead of antcall) also improves performance by a great amount. 1.6 really was a big improvement for us!
 
Bear Bibeault
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a build script needs as much care as any other code



Amen, brother!!!
 
somkiat puisungnoen
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Originally posted by Mike Clark:


I found this short article to be helpful in groking the new features:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/bodewig_ant1.6.html

Mike



It's good link.

Thank you for your link and all reply.
 
Ilja Preuss
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Originally posted by Mike Clark:


I found this short article to be helpful in groking the new features:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/bodewig_ant1.6.html

Mike



Another nice resource is the wiki: http://wiki.apache.org/ant/NewAntFeaturesInDetail
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