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Subject: [warning inflammatory email] Stagn-ant?
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From: dion@multitask.com.au
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 <OF67052A14.BF8B52F2-ON4A256BEF.0039F960-4A256BEF.003CF6D9@multitask.com.au>
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 21:20:41 +1000
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Long Email Warning....

I've spent some time this weekend reading up on the various proposals for 
Ant 2, and my first reaction is:

'Is Ant dead?'

Ant 1.x has been around a very long time now, and some of the proposals 
have been around for more than a year. It seems that there is a general 
unwillingness to make a move forward.

Proposals still seem to be heavily rooted in Ant 1.x terminology and 
technology and offer some 'goodies' to the end user, but little as a 
driving factor to move to something else is evident.

In the meantime, other projects have come along building on top of and 
next to Ant (Jelly, Maven, Centipede etc), usurping what would seem to be 
Ant 2's territory. These projects have no 'history' to deal with and can 
freely move forward with new ideas and technologies, that the Ant team 
seems reluctant to touch, e.g. scripting, backward compatibility etc.

The current unspoken decision seems to be that none of the proposals are 
acceptable, and that the evolution of Ant 1 is the direction that will be 
taken, albeit at a slower pace than seems possible elsewhere.

Maybe Ant2 will come from outside of ant-dev? Maybe Jelly, for example, 
will become what everyone uses and people will gradually stop using Ant as 
their main tool for builds. Maybe it will be a user friendly 
Forrest/Gump/Centipede combo?

So is it time to revisit what the requirements are for Ant 2 ( 
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/ant2/ ) ? What do users actually want? To 
write xml files and understand the oddities of history? Do people believe 
that developers want to write build files for small projects?

Personally, as a long time user of Ant 1.x, it's interesting reading the 
existing proposals and seeing how heavily we all have been influenced by 
some of the key concepts that Ant 1 used. After looking around, maybe we 
need to throw the bath water out and keep the baby, i.e. go back to the 
drawing board. For example, for a 'build' tool, having your top level 
element as 'project' is an unusual choice. The expression language of Ant 
is also an interesting point, as jexl and jsptl gain ground (?) Also, the 
concept of 'tasks' and 'datatypes' - <sarcasm>could we get a little more 
generic?</sarcasm>

This is not a wholesale swipe @ the current Ant team. I think they do a 
fantastic job. And I love Ant....

I realise a lot of this has been said already, but it's been a long time 
since Ant2 has been mentioned seriously, and I personally feel that Ant 
itself has stagnated, and needs something/someone to poke an iron into the 
ashes to see if there's any fire left.

--
dIon Gillard, Multitask Consulting
Work:      http://www.multitask.com.au
Developers: http://adslgateway.multitask.com.au/developers

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