MF Bliki: JRake

On the Martin blog I’ve found an old post about JRake. He wrote this in 2006. In 2007 we are still using Ant, we still loose time in that language/tool to build our apps.

MF Bliki: JRake
around 2000 we both made the mistake of thinking an XML based build file was the way to go

I am not sure if JRake will be the Ant killer, I’ll try it as soon as possible. I am sure that we should really give up to pretend that Ant is a scripting language or that Ant is good.

Ant code tends to entropy. Encourages copy and paste. It’s not powerful. You can loose your life following/searching import s and macro definitions. In big/complex projects you can get lost in the ant bloody codebase.

In addition, but maybe it’s a personal problem, every time that I’ve to use something I forget the syntax, this because the nice ant guys gave to the developer always 3-4 different ways to perform a task. This to me is confusing and I’m always on the manual page to read the documentation. I don’t like Xml. I don’t like files of 1000 lines and I’ve seen more than one in my life talking about Ant.

That’s it.

Next time, give to JRake a try. Maybe you’ll be happier.