From owner-freebsd-java Tue Feb 26 10:30:11 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-java@freebsd.org Received: from aiai.ed.ac.uk (eigg.aiai.ed.ac.uk [129.215.41.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 70A6037B400 for ; Tue, 26 Feb 2002 10:30:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from todday (todday.aiai.ed.ac.uk [129.215.105.40]) by aiai.ed.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id SAA05283 for ; Tue, 26 Feb 2002 18:30:06 GMT Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 18:30:05 GMT Message-Id: <23270.200202261830@todday> From: Jeff Dalton Subject: RE: What is ant good for? To: freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: Bissell, Tim's message of Tue, 26 Feb 2002 17:00:52 -0000 Sender: owner-freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > 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. javac works out only some fairly direct dependencies. Some versions used to do more with -depend or, later, -Xdepend; but that doesn't seem to be something I can rely on. > ... It is relatively easy to write a build.xml > which downloads all needed sources, compiles and installs. > Adding new specialized tasks isn't very hard either. But since I don't download sources or install ... It sounds like ant is useful if you're doing things in a way that's already fairly elaborate, like using CVS and moving things to some installed location after they're built, etc; but if instead I'm trying to avoid such complexity ... > the java compiler is quite > fast when used inside the Ant JVM - you lose the startup costs. That sounds good. > 'tisnt script! it's xml. xml is *cool*. use psgml and font-lock in emacs > and the build.xml file will start to make much more sense, But what you you call the file the tells Ant what to do? (I knew the *contents* was XML ...) (BTW, I find XML quite verbose and hard to read. What is psgml?) Thanks to everyone who's responded, by the way. Indeed, the whole tools / IDE discussion has been very useful. -- Jeff To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-java" in the body of the message