Cato's Place

After announcing my plans to compare Ant, Maven and Gradle implementations in my previous post Ant, Maven, Gradle…or something else… almost 2 months ago, I have finally found some time to begin my little experiment.

The initial implementation involves the use of Ant with Ivy, to build and test a simple Java class. Dependencies including Ivy itself, JUnit 4.8.2 and OpenPojo should be obtained as part of the build itself. Anyone wishing to use the build should only require a working Java environment and Ant installed. It appeared to be simple enough in principle. It turns out to be a little more complicated in practice.

Challenges encountered with this implementation thus far:

• Bootstrapping of Apache Ivy (this was expected)
• JUnit 4.8.2 has not been released into any Maven repositories
• OpenPojo doesn’t exist in any Maven repositories

The repository issues will affect all of the implementations. This lead me to consider adding a local repository manager (to which I could install the required artifacts) to the experiment.

With Ant/Ivy I can bootstrap the appropriate artifacts and install them locally. I believe adding a local repository manager such as Artifactory, Archiva or Nexus would provide a better solution – but at the expense of adding  a requirement that the user have a repository manager installed (with the appropriate artifacts) for the build to run successfully. Thus for the Ant/Ivy implementation I don’t plan to use a repository manager.

So that leaves me with the 3 challenges to meet. I shall deal with each of these in a separate blog entry, as and when I have completed a reasonable solution. I shall also post the relevant code to GitHub for those interested in testing it and providing feedback.

Do you have any comments about the implementation? Should I be using a repository manager? What is the best way to bootstrap the required artifacts? Any suggestions/ideas? If so please add them in a comment below.

Tags: ant, ivy, JUnit, OpenPojo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 12:12 am and is filed under Ant, Build Process, Ivy, JUnit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.