Long Email Warning....
I've spent some time this weekend reading up on the various proposals for
Ant 2, and my first reaction is:
'Is Ant dead?'
Ant 1.x has been around a very long time now, and some of the proposals
have been around for more than a year. It seems that there is a general
unwillingness to make a move forward.
Proposals still seem to be heavily rooted in Ant 1.x terminology and
technology and offer some 'goodies' to the end user, but little as a
driving factor to move to something else is evident.
In the meantime, other projects have come along building on top of and
next to Ant (Jelly, Maven, Centipede etc), usurping what would seem to be
Ant 2's territory. These projects have no 'history' to deal with and can
freely move forward with new ideas and technologies, that the Ant team
seems reluctant to touch, e.g. scripting, backward compatibility etc.
The current unspoken decision seems to be that none of the proposals are
acceptable, and that the evolution of Ant 1 is the direction that will be
taken, albeit at a slower pace than seems possible elsewhere.
Maybe Ant2 will come from outside of ant-dev? Maybe Jelly, for example,
will become what everyone uses and people will gradually stop using Ant as
their main tool for builds. Maybe it will be a user friendly
Forrest/Gump/Centipede combo?
So is it time to revisit what the requirements are for Ant 2 (
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/ant2/ ) ? What do users actually want? To
write xml files and understand the oddities of history? Do people believe
that developers want to write build files for small projects?
Personally, as a long time user of Ant 1.x, it's interesting reading the
existing proposals and seeing how heavily we all have been influenced by
some of the key concepts that Ant 1 used. After looking around, maybe we
need to throw the bath water out and keep the baby, i.e. go back to the
drawing board. For example, for a 'build' tool, having your top level
element as 'project' is an unusual choice. The expression language of Ant
is also an interesting point, as jexl and jsptl gain ground (?) Also, the
concept of 'tasks' and 'datatypes' - <sarcasm>could we get a little more
generic?</sarcasm>
This is not a wholesale swipe @ the current Ant team. I think they do a
fantastic job. And I love Ant....
I realise a lot of this has been said already, but it's been a long time
since Ant2 has been mentioned seriously, and I personally feel that Ant
itself has stagnated, and needs something/someone to poke an iron into the
ashes to see if there's any fire left.
--
dIon Gillard, Multitask Consulting
Work: http://www.multitask.com.au
Developers: http://adslgateway.multitask.com.au/developers
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