Thursday, December 14, 2006

Building With Ant + Maven Antlib?

I discovered a new baby in the build world. Some open source projects use a combination of ant and maven. I thought you could vaguely use ant from maven. But I did not know of Maven Antlib that allows you to use maven2 from Ant. Why would you use Maven2 from Ant?

  • because Maven2 requires to adapt your project to its standard hierarchy, or to have excellent Maven2 skills to create your own archetype for each existing project.
  • because everybody knows Ant, but Ant does not manage dependencies well. Maven2 Antlib can be used just for that: managing dependencies.
I have to try that on a real project to see if it is really an easy and flexible approach, better than plain Maven2.

1 comment :

  1. I use this combination in qwicket, my JasperReports book, as well as some internal/customer applications. It works quite well. I highly recommend it if you want dep management without the hassle of learning maven.

    Justin Lee
    http://antwerkz.com

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