Presentation: "Groovin' builds Gant get any easier"

Track: Build

Time: Monday 11:30 - 12:20

Location: Rytmisk Sal

Abstract:

There's no question that Ant is the de facto standard for building Java applications; however, even its creator has acknowledged an inherent limitation with Ant's expressiveness due to its reliance on XML. Recently, the popularity of Ruby and the Rails framework has brought focus on Ruby's de facto build platform: Rake. Rake's expressiveness comes from its reliance on Ruby itself to define a DSL for software assembly. While Rake's ultimate focus is Ruby, there are a number of interesting projects that utilize expressive DSLs for building Java including Gant, which uses Groovy as a DSL format and builds upon Ant's existing cornucopia of tasks.

In this session, we'll examine why Ant is possibly limiting and attempt to understand why Rake for Ruby is arguably more expressive-- from there we'll see Gant in action and see first hand how brining Ant into a fully functional language yields an expressiveness unmatched in XML. By the end, you'll be eager to download Gant and put your Groovy skills into action for constructing a highly flexible and extensible build system that moves concepts to cash in short order.

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President Andrew Glover, Indepentent Consultant

President Andrew  Glover Andrew Glover is a developer who writes for multiple online publications including IBM's DeveloperWorks, Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals, Dev2Dev, and InfoQ; additionally, he is the co-author of Java Testing Patterns (Wiley, 2004), Groovy in Action (Manning, 2007), and Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Addison-Wesley, June 2007). He is a frequent speaker at various conferences around the US as well as a speaker for the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium group. You can keep up with him at thediscoblog.com.