Adam Sherman

Some time ago, I posted a short entry on Maven vs Ant. Since then, I have continued to use Ant while periodically taking yet another look at Maven.

This week, I came across this post on Otaku talking about keeping your Ant builds maintainable using <import> and <macrodef>. Greater maintainability seems to be one of the reasons Maven was created: allowing you to avoid creating build target spaghetti by describing the project and applying standard goals. These new Ant features can provide this maintainability, while keeping all the flexibility we’ve grown accustomed to.

Cedric’s post then led me to this comment thread on techno.blog(“Dion”) where a good discussion is taking place.

Finally, I can no longer remember how I got there, but dependancy management tools for Ant came up. TSS has an article on Savant, part of Inversoft‘s Verge project and a post on Mallim Ink pointed me to Jayasoft’s Ivy project. Both projects look very interesting; I think I will try out Ivy shortly.

Update: Colin writes about Ivy and seems very positive.