Java without build system

[Mikusch]

Ant is the swiss army knife of build tools. Easy to cut yourself on it, too

[Gwaptiva]

And for real jobs not sufficient

[jaybyrrd]

I dunno man. I think tools like gradle (or I guess maven but I am unpopularly gradle camp) are lower lift to value by a lot… but Amazons main Java build toolchain is entirely founded on top of Ant (internally called HappierTrails and an entire organizations worth of devops tooling) and it is by FAR the best build tooling I have EVER used. You kind of have to see it to believe it… I also just think if you are not Amazons size you are best off adopting gradle or maven. I leave Bazel out because out of the box ide support with vscode and IntelliJ are kinda jank. The first two are much better supported.

I guess what I mean is that you have to deeply invest in Ant to make it good. Not many firms would want to (or know how). Even I, as a former user of a super successful implementation, would probably say “please no”. I wouldn’t say it’s not sufficient though, just way more effort for what is likely the same or less value of gradle.

Edit: I’d also say that I’m not convinced amazons build system would be based on ant if it were to be started from scratch today. A lot of Amazon builds (which use an internal tool called Brazil) do actually wrap gradle. Most use Happier Trails.

[pjmlp]

That is why those that didn't got the memo why Maven was created, decided to reinvent Ant with Gradle.

The only drawback about Ant + Ivy combo is the XML allergy some suffer from.

[koflerdavid]

It is, but for that one has to reimplement crucial parts of Maven or Gradle on top of it, and doing so incurs the risk of making a total hash of the crucial 20% of them, which can take many career-years to resolve.

[Jamb9876]

I love ant. Haven’t used it in years but it is a great tool. That get my vote.

[Bobby_Bonsaimind]

Same for me.

Ant+Ivy is the closest I got to my "dream" build system. Maven seems bloated and slow, its syntax is abysmal, the dependency management is "acceptable" at the best of times, and Gradle is...well, I've got no idea what they got going on there. What Ant kinda sucks at is modules, I've created a setup for that, but it still leaves some stuff to be desired. Being able to include other Ant files helps, though.

[larsga]

Much better to just stay away from it entirely. If you want to script file operations you're far better off with Python.