I found out that Gant is pretty cool but then I started to search for something using ruby, rake and java…

And I found that back in 2006 Martin Fowler and Mattew Foemmel were already talking and working on this…

So I’ve sent an email to Mattew since his svn repository wasn’t neither working, I’ve got the code of his jrake and I’ve started a project on Google code, the name, unfortunately is j-rake (another jrake project was already there).

I’ve just did the first check in, compacting the vendor folder on all the scripts. J-Rake in fact comes out with jruby, rake and all the libraries you need to compile and test your code.

The next small step will be to upgrade all the libraries to the latest version, then some more clean up and then writing more examples on how to write J-Rake tasks.

I’ve a very bad rake/ruby knowledge so any help/suggestion is more than welcome.

So I thought about branching ant and rewriting it in a slightly different way, using yaml instead of xml and having always only one option for any task parameter. I always hated and found difficult to remember how to do things in ant since there are always two or more good alternatives (like why there’s a dir and a file parameter option in the delete command? Isn’t a directory a file?).

So, I don’t think I’ll be able to allocate a lot of time to this, but I would love to hear something from you, ideas and comments.

In the last weeks I’ve started to write a shared mind map with Staffan Nöteberg on micro time boxing… Maybe we can do the same with this topic.

Ping me if you’re interested.