Rosetta Stone for Java Build Tools

A previous post introduced the idea behind Easter's Eggs: quality examples that I'll use for reference and am sharing with the world.

My latest effort is a modest work in progress. The idea is to build a Rosetta Stone example for Java build tools. In particular: Ant, Ivy, Maven, Gant, and Gradle.

It's called Easter's Eggs for Build Tools and is hosted on GitHub. (You can download without an account.)

My main motivation is that most build tools have solid examples, but when dealing with build issues, chances are, I'm in a hurry. I don't have time to understand some new, contrived example. And for new tools, I don't care about bells and whistles. I just want to see something that works!

Consequently, I decided to develop the same examples across different tools.

Currently, it features only a simple project containing a POJO, a Hibernate mapping, and an integration test. This project is expressed in several forms, and the test should pass in each one. (Consult the respective README.txt)

I don't envision many more projects, but I'd like to develop a multi-project example and probably a war file.

Some of the examples took serious effort, as I'm a newbie to some of these tools. I sincerely hope this helps someone who is looking for a foothold.

Feedback is always welcome.

Life After Ant

Here's an interesting post on new-age build tools like Rake and Gant.

A moderately new thought (for me) on build tools:

Things that we use _all the time_ tend to resist change. For example, in natural language, the verbs “to be” and “to have” are notoriously weird because they aren’t made “regular”, as is the tendency with less-used verbs. We don't think about "to have" or "to be": we just use them. All the time.

Similarly, build tools have amazing resilience. The industry suffered with ‘make’ for decades. The fact that Ant saved us from ‘make’ is enough for it to go into the Hall of Fame.

I'm in no hurry to see Ant go away. I am intrigued though by Gant.