From: Tanner Burson <tanner.burson@...>
Date: 2006-12-09T05:03:56+09:00
Subject: Re: replacing maven with rake + rjb + ant

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On 12/8/06, thebox <piergiuliano.bossi.news@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> We do 99.999% of our development in java. Our system is a complex J2EE
> distributed application currently (poorly) managed with maven. Now, I
> don't want to get into the reasons for doing this, but we have
> struggled enough to seriously consider replacing maven with some decent
> build tool.
>
> Of course, rake is attractive because it has real file-dependant tasks,
> it supports both declarative and imperative programming styles and
> today I think we may stick with it, waiting for eventually more
> maturity from rant.
>
> The point of this post though is that we would like to find a  way to
> coordinate common java task (like compiling, jaring, waring, deploying
> in containers, etc.) without reinventing the wheel. An obvious choice
> would be to piggy back on maven through system calls, but my ambitions
> are bigger than that, because I want to break the addiction with maven
> repository dependency management structure.
>
> A better idea would be to rely on ant and of course you want to do it
> in an efficient manner. As Martin Fowler mentioned in his article [1],
> best way would be to run ant as a server, so that you don't have to pay
> jvm initialization startup time for any call. Apparently, Jon Tirsen
> has never released his code (or I wasn't able to find it). I've only
> found an old "proof of concept" in codehaus [2]. I'm looking for
> something more solid than that.
>
> Ant can be effectively driven like a server, by simply using an
> extension like Ant-Contrib [3]. The only problem is that if you use
> Ant-Contrib as it is, the protocol between a client and an ant server
> relies on java object serialization, making it practically useless from
> the ruby world (you don't really want to reproduce the java object
> serialization protocol in ruby, do you?!?).
>
> Hence, I'm currently thinking about using rjb to instantiate
> client-side Ant-Contrib java classes from rake and then understand if I
> can let the jvm dealing with socket communication, or I serialize java
> objects on a bytestream and let ruby handle the communication over the
> socket. This is in theory, of course, because I've never used rjb
> before and I don't know how easy, manageable and fast it is.
>
> What do you guys think about it? Anybody has any experience around
> stuff like this? Alternatives?


I don't know the full status of it, but there is a Ruby implementation
targetting the JVM.  I'm unsure of whether Rake has been made to work on it
yet, but it could be a great tool in the very least at calling into Ant
without adding the overhead of another JVM initialization.

[1] http://jruby.codehaus.org/

Thanks
> Giuliano
>
> [1] ==> http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html
> [2] ==>
>
> http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/HAUS-211;jsessionid=asvbK6wlqWt7H6hWmN?actionOrder=desc
> [3] ==> http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/
>
>
>


-- 
===Tanner Burson===
tanner.burson@gmail.com
http://www.tannerburson.com

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