My presentation last night at J2EESig went pretty good. It was supposed to be a hands-on format working through building and deploying a JSP based application.
The night before, Wednesday, was the lecture, and it was supposed to cover both an intro to JSP and briefly touch on Ant. The presenter was unable to get through all his JSP material and we really needed the Ant material presented so I started my presentation with that.
It amazed me to find so many people last night that aren’t using Ant and have really no experience with Ant. I love Ant and was glad to spend a big chunk of my time last night covering Ant basics and then I spent some time talking about how I’m using it at work.
If you aren’t using Ant what the heck are you using to build your Java-based projects?
I love ant!
I had a consulting gig at a large company that deals with payroll about a year ago.
They were building and deploying their J2EE application by building it in IBM’s WSAD.
My entire gig was to create an ant build. They had about 30 manual steps to create the build, including un-jaring files, deleteing files from the jar, and re-jarring files. It was horrendeous. They couldn’t actualy recreate any distributions of their product because of all the manual steps! After I left they could just type “ant dist” and it would check out all their code from CVS, create the full distribution, and tag it in CVS. Normally that would take a few days.
It took me 6 weeks because:
1) They kept making me do the manual build process for them because they had no release management. The manual process took almost 3 hours.
2) There were so many problems (i.e. circular dependencies) that I had to solve that the work was exponentially harder
3) I was pulled into meetings every day, they lasted for hours….
Now I work for JBoss full time and it’s the opposite. Just get the work done, with minimal unnecessary bureaucracy. It’s quite refreshing!
Take care,
-Frank