From: Caleb Powell <caleb.powell@...>
Date: 2007-03-15T02:51:10+09:00
Subject: Re: replacing maven with rake + rjb + ant

Hi,

with regards to invoking Ant tasks from a Ruby script, you might like
to look at Antwrap:

Project Page: https://rubyforge.org/projects/antwrap/
Docs: http://antwrap.rubyforge.org/

It is being used by the Raven build tool for Ant tasks, but is also
available as a gem. It currently  works on the JRuby interpreter.
However, I have it working in the native (or standard) Ruby
interpreter by using the Ruby Java Bridge. An update for this will be
coming
soon.
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?
>
> 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/
>
>
>


-- 
Caleb

"There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck
Norris allows to live."