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.