Experiences with Megg

The tool Megg has been brought up in a number of posts this week.

Could those that use it pipe in with their experiences? I've always found the task of setting up a new project skeleton quite tedious and this sounds like it could be just the ticket.
[ September 22, 2004: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]

I started with Mike's template. With that working, I made a copy and modified it to suit my preferred layout, which is very similar to that described in PPA. Finally, I wrote a very brief Windows batch file that sets up the environment and runs Megg with a supplied parameter or two. Now, I run the batch file, answer a few questions and begin working right away!

Craig

I'm known to be a minimalist when it comes to tools. I (heart) simple tools that have a lot of mechanical advantage, so to speak. Megg fits that criteria for me. It gives me an easy way to build a template for directory structures and file contents, then distribute that template across a team or community by posting the template on the web.

In a sense, Megg is a very lightweight version of Maven, though Megg doesn't handle dependency management and such. It's not a fair comparison, I grant you.

Mike

Just something I remember thinking about when I first stumbled on Megg the first time:

Hmm. You know, I like this tool a lot but it's a bit too "small" and rarely used to really stick with you. Every time, you need to go and download the megg.jar file, figure out whether you had to provide some command line arguments, and then run the jar file. Wouldn't it be easier for someone like me to have a website that asks me all those questions about the template I've selected (including selecting the template) and have me download the resulting project structure as a .zip file?

As I said, just something I remember thinking about. Obviously there are very good reasons for preferring a "local" Megg, but there's still something about not having to download the .jar file first.

What do others thing?

Originally posted by Lasse Koskela:

As I said, just something I remember thinking about. Obviously there are very good reasons for preferring a "local" Megg, but there's still something about not having to download the .jar file first.

What do others thing?

I could also imagine a webstart version. Though I'm not sure wether that'd still pass for being simple...

I've sent Jeremy (creator of megg) a link to this thread so perhaps he'll chime in at some stage.

Originally posted by Simon Brown:
I've sent Jeremy (creator of megg) a link to this thread so perhaps he'll chime in at some stage.

I attempted to contact Jeremy a while back to send him a complimentary copy of the book for his work on Megg, but his email address (a bigfoot account) bounced. If you could hook us up somehow, I'd love to send him a copy.

Thanks!

Mike

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
> The tool Megg has been brought up in a number of posts this week.
> Could those that use it pipe in with their experiences?

I wrote megg to fulfill a very specific purpose.

I have a train journey each day, and was finding half of my
journey involved setting up the project structure before
I could even start on the problem at hand.

The driving requirements for me were

best practices on even the smallest projects

- I distilled best ant practices from the wonderful Ant book (Hatcher+Loughran) into the default java template

make the project structure templates into one tangible chunk

- they can be zipped or tar.gz files at any URL you specify

make the templates 'purpose' independant

- you can setup _any_ kind of directory structure with megg, not just java projects

small/simple to use

- megg will do something useful, when invoked with java -jar megg.jar

I still use megg at the start of each project myself and find it invaluable
in providing a consistent and useful project structure.

Originally posted by Lasse Koskela:
> Wouldn't it be easier for someone like me to have a website that
> asks me all those questions about the template I've selected
> (including selecting the template) and have me download the
> resulting project structure as a .zip file?

This is a really nice idea, I'll have a play with writing a web application
wrapper for megg, that leads the user all the way through the process.

Originally posted by Ilja Preuss:
> I could also imagine a webstart version.

This is doable, were you thinking of a Swing parameter Q&A, or would console based user prompting be enough?

I was thinking that megg could quite easily be an IntelliJ/Eclipse plugin too.

You'll notice that the templates are actually ignorant when it comes to what
actual tool is manipulating them. I'm hoping that I can write versions of
megg using .net, perl etc... The key factor is the templates would be the
same format for all platforms (zipped or tar.gz directory structures)

Originally posted by Craig Demyanovich:
> After reading his book, I combined his best practices with what
> I was using for a very nice layout, and I've used Megg to make
> it easy to begin each new project

Craig, I'd be interested in seeing your templates, or anyones for that
matter, always looking for cool templates...

Thanks to Mike for all the publicity for megg, it gives me the warm
fuzzies to see that a tool I use is actually useful to everyone else
too.

I'll hang around this list for a while, if anyone has any more questions, ideas :-)

jez.
[ September 23, 2004: Message edited by: Jeremy Rayner ]

I've sent my Megg template to Jeremy privately. I don't have much bandwidth to spare, so I won't share a URL here, but I'd be happy to share the template with anyone who wants it. Remember, since I was already using a project structure like Mike's, I just copied his template and tweaked it for use here at my company.

Craig