Re: AAP as a Maven replacement

On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 01:03:30PM +0200, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
> Guido Kollerie wrote:
> 
> > I was wondering if anyone has been using AAP as a Maven
> > replacement and if so what their experiences are?
> 
> What is Maven?  Do you have a URL perhaps?

From the website: http://maven.apache.org/

     Maven is a Java project management and project comprehension
     tool. Maven is based on the concept of a project object
     model (POM) in that all the artifacts produced by Maven are
     a result of consulting a well defined model for your
     project. Builds, documentation, source metrics, and source
     cross-references are all controlled by your POM.

At the company I work for we mainly used it for dependency
tracking/management. Maven allows one to specify what
subprojects/modules/etc one's projects depends on. When building
one's project Maven makes sure the dependencies are there and if
necessary downloads them from one or more predefined
repositories.

Maven also allows you to specify targets (goals in Maven terms)
for deploying one's projects to production, generate
documentation, run unit tests.

It's similar in a sense to Ant (http://ant.apache.org/) though a
lot of functionality has already be predefined.

Problem with Maven though (and so many other tools in the Java
space) is that one thought it was necessary to use XML for
the config file (POM), resulting in atrocities such as:

    <j:forEach items="${goals}" var="goal" indexVar="goalNumber">
         Now attaining goal number ${goalNumber}, which is ${goal}
        <attainGoal name="${goal}" />
    </j:forEach>

Worse though the lack of comprehensive documentation makes Maven
unnecessarily complex!

AAP on the other hand has a much more natural syntax to me and is
very well documented. I am currently reading through the manual
and I have got the feeling it's possible to do what Maven does.
It will probably require writing a module as has been done for D
and KDE. Not sure yet if this is something I'll end up doing, but
I will experiment a little with AAP to get a better feel for it. 

-- 
Guido

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