[CLUE-Tech] Cruise Control and Ant software development tools

[David Anselmi]

Kevin Cullis wrote:
> 
> Hey all,
> 
> It was mentioned to me about cruise control and Ant (Hill?) software
> that is Open source software, do any of you have any experience with it?
> How do you like it/them?

Ant is a make replacement for Java from the Jakarta people.  I used it
once because that's how you build their Tomcat server.  Worked fine.  It
uses XML files to define dependencies, which may be less cryptic than
makefiles.

At the time, our Java development team was using make on our Java
project.  Since they have switched to Ant.  The biggest advantage is
that now they can use the same build system on Unix and Win--before
there were differences that caused problems.  Of course running the app
on Windows is still different than the production environment so that
causes problems too.

Ant was used to make significant improvements in the build process,
though whether that was due to Ant being great or the builders being
smarter, I don't know.

Dave