Comments on: Is Apache Ant Dead/Dying?

By: bwtaylor

bwtaylor — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:15:43 +0000

Here’s a blog I wrote a while back comparing ant, maven, and gant. http://blog.bwtaylor.com/java/2008/01/26/ant_maven_gant_pros_cons

By: Michael Easter

Michael Easter — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:05:02 +0000

A big +1 for Gant. IMO, Gant may well point the way for the “next-gen” all-purpose build tool.

I gave a talk on this recently. My main analogy is this: imagine that Ant is a giant clockworks that keeps perfect time. We can add new gears to the clock, but it is so “high ceremony” that it is a deterrent. Also, doing anything programmatic with the AntContrib tasks is simply brutal.

By contrast, Gant is a “melted clock” from a Dali painting: it still keeps time (and provides access to the “old iron” of Ant), but it is far more pliable and flexible. It is trivial to extend and do logic/iterative tasks, because it is the full-power of Groovy.

By: jlee

jlee — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:04:29 +0000

We’re evaluating gant at ${work}. We’re (well, my coworker) just trying to figure out how to nicely include base scripts and override certain targets/definitions. We’ll almost certainly end up with something groovy based, though, as I’ve been writing more and more groovy-based tasks in my build.xml. Groovy seems the most natural fit at this point.

By: Francois MAROT

Francois MAROT — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:16:00 +0000

There is GANT, based on ANT which can be really useful: http://gant.codehaus.org/
It uses GROOVY as a scripting language and eases the way to call ANT tasks.

By: Stefan Bodewig

Stefan Bodewig — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:02:24 +0000

I just realized that we’ve never updated the site, DOH!

Ant 1.7.1beta has been in its second beta since a few weeks http://people.apache.org/dist/ant/v1.7.1beta2/ - and should be released pretty soon.