Sweetened

[Jon Stevens <la...@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

For those of you frustrated with the complexity of Maven and Ivy
dependency management, Sweetened is a great ant only solution for
dealing with your jar files. It is blazing fast, easy to understand
and integrates really well with Eclipse.

http://code.google.com/p/sweetened/

I'd like to thank everyone here for their help getting it going. It is
working great in a environment with about 15 developers and ~10
projects.

cheers,

jon

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Re: Sweetened

[Jon Stevens <la...@gmail.com>]

For me, building projects is primarily these things:

a) Dependency resolution shouldn't be that difficult. I can put some
#comment notes in my jar.properties file if I need to remember
something. I feel that if your projects are all so complicated to
build that you actually need uber complicated dependency resolution,
then maybe something else is wrong with the design of your build
system.

b) Speed. Builds need to go as fast as possible. So far, Ant is the
only tool I've found that really does things quickly. If you add more
layers of complexity into your build, you are slowing yourself down in
both the ability to work with the build system as well as develop with
it.

c) Simplicity. Before I started Sweetened, I seriously took a look at
the various build tools currently out there and tried to integrate
them into my relatively simple builds. Everything I found required
complicated setup based around questionable documentation. I've been
working for the past few years to generate open source software that
is well documented and easy to use (@see subetha, subethasmtp,
kaptcha, sardine). If I have a project that has 10 jar files, all I
want is something that just sits directly on top of the tool we all
already know and love. Something that doesn't get into the way, cause
random problems and something that does exactly what I want.

Ivy fails the KISS test. It is just too complicated and slow. Sure, as
you say, you can just have a local repository, but if you are going to
do that, you might as well not use it at all. Just use Sweetened and
get the same benefits, but without the extra junk you don't need.

cheers,

jon


On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 2:59 AM, Jeffrey Sinclair <je...@cooljeff.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi Jon,
>
> This is an interesting project for me because I've set up Ivy in a very
> large enterprise environment and appreciate some of the issues you are
> trying to address. However I would like to play devil's advocate here
> and open up a discussion by asking the following:
>
> What is the real sweeter that this is offering over Ivy?
>
> As far as I can tell from a quick skim over the user manual the big
> benefits are around: build speed and reduction in build issues.
>
> I'd question whether or not it would simplify dramatically a very basic
> Ivy setup which had one file system resolver pointing to your Alexandra
> repository without any ivy.xml meta data (i.e. you explicitly state your
> jars).
>
> For me one of the big limitations of Ivy in the enterprise is the need
> to constantly re-obtain a classpath when the dependencies have not
> changed. When your constantly rebuilding changes on the command line
> through Ant, the Ivy resolution process becomes a productivity
> inhibitor. This is even more so with IvyDE when you have very complex
> inter project dependencies.
>
> For me if Ivy was a little smarter by caching the classpath fully to
> avoid even the existing logic of an ivy-cachepath (unless the
> dependencies have changed), then the build speed issue would be
> resolved.
>
> Jeff
>
> On Sat, 2010-07-03 at 23:06 -0700, Jon Stevens wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> For those of you frustrated with the complexity of Maven and Ivy
>> dependency management, Sweetened is a great ant only solution for
>> dealing with your jar files. It is blazing fast, easy to understand
>> and integrates really well with Eclipse.
>>
>> http://code.google.com/p/sweetened/
>>
>> I'd like to thank everyone here for their help getting it going. It is
>> working great in a environment with about 15 developers and ~10
>> projects.
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> jon
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@ant.apache.org
>> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@ant.apache.org
>>
>
>
>
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@ant.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@ant.apache.org
>
>

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Re: Sweetened

[Jeffrey Sinclair <je...@cooljeff.co.uk>]

Hi Jon,

This is an interesting project for me because I've set up Ivy in a very
large enterprise environment and appreciate some of the issues you are
trying to address. However I would like to play devil's advocate here
and open up a discussion by asking the following:

What is the real sweeter that this is offering over Ivy?

As far as I can tell from a quick skim over the user manual the big
benefits are around: build speed and reduction in build issues. 

I'd question whether or not it would simplify dramatically a very basic
Ivy setup which had one file system resolver pointing to your Alexandra
repository without any ivy.xml meta data (i.e. you explicitly state your
jars).

For me one of the big limitations of Ivy in the enterprise is the need
to constantly re-obtain a classpath when the dependencies have not
changed. When your constantly rebuilding changes on the command line
through Ant, the Ivy resolution process becomes a productivity
inhibitor. This is even more so with IvyDE when you have very complex
inter project dependencies.

For me if Ivy was a little smarter by caching the classpath fully to
avoid even the existing logic of an ivy-cachepath (unless the
dependencies have changed), then the build speed issue would be
resolved.

Jeff

On Sat, 2010-07-03 at 23:06 -0700, Jon Stevens wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> For those of you frustrated with the complexity of Maven and Ivy
> dependency management, Sweetened is a great ant only solution for
> dealing with your jar files. It is blazing fast, easy to understand
> and integrates really well with Eclipse.
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/sweetened/
> 
> I'd like to thank everyone here for their help getting it going. It is
> working great in a environment with about 15 developers and ~10
> projects.
> 
> cheers,
> 
> jon
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@ant.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@ant.apache.org
> 



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