Re: How to start with JAVA on I-series

On 11/2/07, Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen <thunderaxiom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

NGay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx skrev den 02-11-2007 16:19:

Brian,

There's a couple of comments you made that sparked my interest:

* Eclipse (WDSC) for code development
* Apache Ant for building and deploying

.... I bundled all my complied classes into Jar files

I've never understood why developers using Eclipse still use Ant? You
don't need to perform a distinct "build" step since Eclipse automatically
compiles every .class file as you changes its source file. So you create
your JARs just by highlighting them, picking File-Export and exporting the
JAR. The only reasons I can think of for using Ant would be:
a) If you had a huge number of JARs and so exporting them one by one was
just too tedious.
b) If you needed your JARs to be different for development & production
environments (which to me is a really bad idea, but I've known one
developer who was quite serious about wanting to do this).

There is one very good reason. Building the final product with ant
allows somebody else on another machine to build it at anytime, perhaps
even automated based on sources in CVS.

Eclipse requires you to click buttons to do stuff, and those things
break. Just had a jardesc-file blow up in my face today. Would not
have happened with ant files.

I definitely agree, but I would add that the benefits of having a
separate build process vary greatly depending on the size of the
project and development team.

Odd, that right before catching up on this thread I just finished
reading this article:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000988.html
Which is remarkably appropriate. The link to the email exchange in the
first article should invoke laughter or much sadness, depending on
your previous team experiences. Either way, it's worth a read if you
haven't already.

Cheers,
Carl.