On 04/18/2010 09:51 AM, Kevin Jackson wrote:
Hi,
Beside attempts like premake and scons, there is no actually
good multiplatform native build toolkits. Existing ant plugins
either follow the premake/scons concept of producing the native
make files, or do a compilation directly, but all of them require
some sort of (usually huge) runtime environment with complex
setup and high learning curve. Ant syntax and concepts should
at least lower down that learning curve thought.
Can I ask, when you say 'syntax' do you mean xml markup or
tasks/targets and the declarative (not imperative) feel to ant?
Yes. As close to ant as possible, meaning xml and declarative feel.
However, unlike ant the focus is on volatile properties and advanced
control flow required by the dynamic nature of target compilers and
OS features.
Going with xml as a 'language' was probably the worst possible choice
for ant - however over time Java has gained some fairly good xml
processing tools, but it's still an unwieldy and cumbersome (and
terribly verbose) way of specifying things.
Look at leiningen [1] for a complete change of pace from ant/mvn xml badness.
There are of course many alternatives to the traditional
configure/make having some adoption (eg. cmake), but they
all suffer from the fact that the learning curve is pretty high.
Like you said there are many good xml tools existing, and anyone
ever looked at the ant's build.xml will have no problem
understanding make.xml.
We could argue weather the xml is the optimal choice, but that
can probably be argued for anything xml is used for.
Regards
--
^TM
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