19Jun/08Off
Is Apache Ant Dead/Dying?
Ant 1.7.0 was released way back in December 2006. Since then, there hasn't been a single update. Not even a maintenance release. Now, ant is a relatively mature product. It's been out a while and is quite stable. But it's certainly not bug free. There's not a lot of activity in the repository apart from the addition of ivy but after that went in activity dropped almost off the chart. I really do like ant despite my desire to see something else. But I fear that with the rising interest in maven, ant development has trailed off. And, to be clear, I despise maven. So, does any one know? The mailing lists at least show activity. Why no releases?
June 19th, 2008 - 16:33
have a look at http://www.gradle.org
June 19th, 2008 - 17:49
Very interesting. I’ll give that a look. Thanks.
June 23rd, 2008 - 04:02
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.
June 23rd, 2008 - 07:16
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.
June 23rd, 2008 - 09:04
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.
June 23rd, 2008 - 18:05
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.
June 23rd, 2008 - 20:15
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