Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 17:00:52 -0000 From: "Bissell, Tim" <Tim.Bissell@DRKW.com> To: freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: What is ant good for? Message-ID: <F1BBCA8B7950D21186320008C7A4D6CB0B5841CD@drkblonc0019.gb.dresdnerkb.com>
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Tubby honest, I'm not convinced Jikes and Ant go together - Jikes' raison d'etre is speed, but the java compiler is quite fast when used inside the Ant JVM - you lose the startup costs. > I've been reading the "tools" discussion, and all I use is emacs, > jdk, and Netscape for reading the on-line documentation. The only > change I'm tempted to make is to start using ant. > > But every time I've looked at anyone's ant script (is script > the right word?), it's seemed alarmingly complex. They often are, but that is because people do lots of things with them > So I'm wondering whether ant does anything that would make it > worth the effort of learning to use it. Yes. Built in and added in tasks are very useful; preprocess entire source trees to fix the source code for JDK 1.1 / Java2 API differences. You can dynamically build classpaths for the ant environment - e.g. put every .jar and .zip in your 'classes' directory into the classpath. build code only if the classes needed to build it are present - see above. Fix line endings e.g. CRLF. Run junit tests Build installations e.g. tar / jar / zip, or run external installer builders And it's portable... I'm sure all of this could be done in make, but not as elegantly. Plus spaces/tabs at the beginning of lines don't break your build 8-) > Does it, for instance, work out the dependencies between files > to determine what needs to be recompiled and what doesn't? Javac does that, so it comes for free in Ant. P.S. On the subject of IDEs, I 've been a staunch Emacs user for the past nineteen years (eeeek!) but for Java, IDEA from www.intellij.com is brilliant, even if it costs lots of money ($200 for a personal licence) and does not provide a GUI builder. The authors churn out new releases with useful improvements fairly regularly as well. Unfortunately my favourite WM (Window Maker) does not like its popup windows, but I just switch to IceWM. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have received this e-mail in error or wish to read our e-mail disclaimer statement and monitoring policy, please refer to http://www.drkw.com/disc/email/ or contact the sender. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-java" in the body of the message
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