costinm@covalent.net wrote on 07/10/2002 12:46:58 AM:
> On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Conor MacNeill wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday, July 9, 2002, at 06:54 , Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
> > >
[snip]
> Well, I think ant1 is one of the cleanest and best documented codebases
> in jakarta and xml.apache. And it seems to have one of the best
> communities, and probably is the most used. Not to mention that the
> "Task" and the other core interfaces and the DTD are a de-facto
standard.
To be fair to Ant, maybe this statement is true, and the codebase is
cleaner than other projects, but IMHO it says more about the other
projects than it does about Ant. As a part-time consumer of the API, the
lack of javadoc is simply stunning. The tests are a god send though.
But the last time I looked at Struts for example, it was a lot better on
documentation in the code bsae than Ant was. Some projects get people who
feel docs and clean code are important, others don't. It's all about
what's important to them.
> Try looking at tomcat, xerces, xalan, axis - all very good and
successfull
> projects. You'll find far more mess and complexity, far less
> documentation.
Sad, really.
> I think this is a result of the simple core design in ant1, plus 2-3
> years of refinement on the codebase.
Personal opinion: I think it's the result of hard work by those working on
Ant, and the 'standards' they require.
[snip]
> Of course, any proposal needs to start by saying that whatever was
> before is broken and can never be fixed. Most revolutions I know
'Never be fixed'? I have always assumed a proposal was about something
that was considered broken, or needing change, not that it could never be
fixed.
> I still have to see one real issue that can't be resolved by
> the current codebase but can be by a proposal.
Of course not. All things are possible given infinite time and energy. The
issue isn't whether they *can* be done in the Ant 1 code base, the issue
is *should* they? My take is that it is faster to do new development using
a cleaner base...
As someone who's done far more reading of Ant code than developing it,
reading the Mutant code base (as an example) is a pleasure compared to the
core Ant code.
--
dIon Gillard, Multitask Consulting
Work: http://www.multitask.com.au
Developers: http://adslgateway.multitask.com.au/developers
|