<Snicker> I’m talking about Buildr, a drop-in replacement for Maven; I’ve never used Maven but boy do people ever hate it. Buildr is written in Ruby not Java, it uses a DSL-ish Ruby dialect for build files instead of XML, and it’s way faster.
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From: Dominic Mitchell (May 07 2007, at 12:04)
Maven is an interesting idea, but it has the worst UI ever.
http://happygiraffe.net/blog/archives/2007/04/17/maven
The POM (XML config file) itself is OK, but pretty verbose and repetitive. The documentation is reasonable, but makes a boat load of assumptions. All in all, it's something I really want to use, but am totally unconvinced by the current implementation. I guess I'd better take a look at buildr...
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From: Cedric (May 07 2007, at 14:03)
How would we know? There is absolutely no doc.
I could never trust a product that thinks that a Javadoc/rdoc is good enough.
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From: Assaf (May 07 2007, at 14:57)
I don't expect anyone to know how to use it without real docs.
There will be an official release that includes real docs, hopefully ones you'll enjoy reading.
http://blog.labnotes.org/2007/05/07/patience-buildr-docs-coming-up/
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From: Steve Ivy (May 07 2007, at 19:07)
Thanks for link, Tim. I had the same reaction (http://redmonk.net/archives/2007/05/07/i-hate-rdoc/) as Cedric, though - what's with the JavaDoc^H^H^H^H^H^H^H RDoc?
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From: John H (May 08 2007, at 05:50)
As I ponder ways of escaping from writing Ant scripts, I'm wondering how Buildr and Maven compare to things like SCons. Anyone out there tried both?
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From: Joe Germuska (May 10 2007, at 14:43)
I won't try to claim that Maven has no flaws, but I will say that as the leader of a small team of webapp developers, adopting Maven 1 three or four years ago was a major factor in enabling us to systematize development.
Developers can roll on to a new project and they know exactly how to get it running for local development and get it built to a test server. For any new project, the Maven plumbing takes minutes, not hours, giving us more time to focus on the more interesting stuff.
Also, as a participant in various Apache open source Java projects, I witnessed first hand how converting to Maven made it much, much simpler to go into a new codebase and be working in it effectively with a minimum of overhead. Compared to what had been the prior art--a series of Ant scripts with a hodgepodge of ways to deal with local variations--it was a revelation to move projects to Maven.
I'll be happy to see people build the next thing which is even better than Maven, but I felt that I had to speak up in defense of something which has proven a great tool for both my professional and my personal development projects.
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