Skip to main content

Make build scripts in GANT

I have always used ANT to create build scripts, and by and large it has served me well. ANT is simple, and it has a wide variety of tasks, which take care of almost all build requirements.

Sometime back when I came across a new build tool called GANT, I was curious as to what it would offer that ANT did not. GANT is really Groovy + ANT. For those of you who are not familiar with Groovy, it is a dynamic language which compiles to bytecode and interoperates very well with Java. So GANT uses Groovy as the language to create build scripts. However all ANT tasks have been made available through Groovy's ANTBuilder. So GANT can use ANT under the hoods, but it is not limited to ANT.

If we need to write custom stuff for a build script, we can either create our own custom ANT task, or alternatively we can write a Groovy function or class. This along with being able to easily add consitional logic in build scripts is a very useful feature. Also since we use Groovy for creating the build scripts, we move away from the cumbersome XML syntax which ANT requires. All this in my opinion is a big advantage for developers.

However, there are a few drawbacks of using GANT. First of all, you will have to spend some time getting familiar with GANT and learning Groovy. Granted that they both have a pretty small learning curve for Java developers, but it's still time that must be spent. Also tooling support for GANT is not as good as it is for ANT. That's at least true for Eclipse. I am not aware of the state of GANT support on NetBeans and IntelliJ (Please share your thoughts in the comments if you have experience using GANT with either of these).

Even though I said that GANT uses Groovy to create the build scripts, what it really uses is a DSL (Domain Specific Language) made on top of Groovy. But within a GANT script we can use Groovy syntax freely. Again there may be some restrictions, but I am not yet aware of them.

There is the sample GANT script shown on GANT's website.

Here is how you might actually compile your programs in GANT

And see this page for an example of using the javac task in ANT.

Give GANT a try, you might actually start liking it over ANT.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My HSQLDB schema inspection story

This is a simple story of my need to inspect the schema of an HSQLDB database for a participar FOREIGN KEY, and the interesting things I had to do to actually inspect it. I am using an HSQLDB 1.8 database in one of my web applications. The application has been developed using the Play framework , which by default uses JPA and Hibernate . A few days back, I wanted to inspect the schema which Hibernate had created for one of my model objects. I started the HSQLDB database on my local machine, and then started the database manager with the following command java -cp ./hsqldb-1.8.0.7.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing When I tried the view the schema of my table, it showed me the columns and column types on that table, but it did not show me columns were FOREIGN KEYs. Image 1: Table schema as shown by HSQLDB's database manager I decided to search on StackOverflow and find out how I could view the full schema of the table in question. I got a few hints, and they all pointed to
Post a Comment
Read more

Fuctional Programming Principles in Scala - Getting Started

Sometime back I registered for the Functional Programming Principles in Scala , on Coursera. I have been meaning to learn Scala from a while, but have been putting it on the back burner because of other commitments. But  when I saw this course being offered by Martin Odersky, on Coursera , I just had to enroll in it. This course is a 7 week course. I will blog my learning experience and notes here for the next seven weeks (well actually six, since the course started on Sept 18th). The first step was to install the required tools: JDK - Since this is my work machine, I already have a couple of JDK's installed SBT - SBT is the Scala Build Tool. Even though I have not looked into it in detail, it seems like a replacement for Maven. I am sure we will use it for several things, however upto now I only know about two uses for it - to submit assignments (which must be a feature added by the course team), and to start the Scala console. Installed sbt from here , and added the path
1 comment
Read more

Five Reasons Why Your Product Needs an Awesome User Guide

Photo Credit: Peter Merholz ( Creative Commons 2.0 SA License ) A user guide is essentially a book-length document containing instructions for installing, using or troubleshooting a hardware or software product. A user guide can be very brief - for example, only 10 or 20 pages or it can be a full-length book of 200 pages or more. -- prismnet.com As engineers, we give a lot of importance to product design, architecture, code quality, and UX. However, when it comes to the user manual, we often only manage to pay lip service. This is not good. A usable manual is as important as usable software because it is the first line of help for the user and the first line of customer service for the organization. Any organization that prides itself on great customer service must have an awesome user manual for the product. In the spirit of listicles - here are at least five reasons why you should have an awesome user manual! Enhance User Satisfaction In my fourteen years as a
Post a Comment
Read more