The Java-centricity of Ant is its biggest weakness. Having to learn Ant for Java and make for everything else is just not good. I just use make for everything and my life is simpler for it.
Chicken and egg. As a Java based tool, Ant was built by and for Java developers, and requires a Java Runtime Environment to execute the scripts.
It's not difficult to add support for compiling and executing stuff other than Java (indeed, there are many such "tasks" already available), it's just that if you are, for example, doing C/C++ development on *nix, you're less likely to be motivated to install, configure and execute a JVM in order to do the builds when make suffices.
Without question though, Ant is the defacto standard for open source Java builds, and rightly so.
What's with all this whining about Litestep being so buggy or limited? I've been using Litestep for nearly two years, on Win98, WintNT *and* Win2K (home, work, laptop) even, and I don't have any problems like this.
Other than having to boot into windows to install new software (a step that's not really necessary all the time anyway), and haven't lost any windows functionality, and my computer (and especially my shell) crashes much less often.
I just can't resist calling your attention to these great quotes from the MS Flux article, namely:
While free distribution is a great marketing tool....what does it say about the product itself? Frankly, it says that the product...has no value.
and
...if you take Stallman's position to the logical conclusion, all intellectual property from patents, to books, to music and art--should be free. If intellectual property isn't property, then just what is property? Why not just give away cars, houses, and everything else?
The first, makes the fundamental capitalistic mistake, assuming price == value.
The second is just so far out there I can't even begin to explain whats wrong with it.
or tobacco manufacturers getting sued when someone dies from smoking Marlboros
The difference here is that big tobacco spent lots of time, money and marketing know-how to figure out how to best sell poison to people.
It's as is a software company went out and marketed an insecure, buggy operating system as an "enteprise solution", all the while knowing that it exposed users to all sorts of risks...
...hey, I even took a class (well, tutorial) in college about writing computer viruses. Practically any mobile code--Java applets, agents, even those nifty avatars in Wender's Until the End of the World could be construed as a virus. Moblity, self-replication, self-modification, these are useful features, even if they are dangerous ones.
Making it a crime to "create a virus" is very bad idea.
Releasing a virus, esp. with the intent of causing harm is a different story, however...
At the risk of saying "yeah, me too", IBM's got something like this in their alphaworks stuff, namely Mapuccino (http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/mapuccino), especially the "fisheye" view.
According to http://www. nyupress.nyu.edu/netwars/textonly/pages/chapter01/ ch01_.html September is a reference to when college/university students return to school and new batch of freshmen (freshpeople?) are first given access to the Internet, start breaking netiquette, posting messages about the modem tax and the Good Times virus, etc. Only that year, the wave of newbies never stopped.
The link above (excerpting net.wars?) attributes this notion to the alt.culture.usenet FAQ.
Slashdot Mirror
Chicken and egg. As a Java based tool, Ant was built by and for Java developers, and requires a Java Runtime Environment to execute the scripts.
It's not difficult to add support for compiling and executing stuff other than Java (indeed, there are many such "tasks" already available), it's just that if you are, for example, doing C/C++ development on *nix, you're less likely to be motivated to install, configure and execute a JVM in order to do the builds when make suffices.
Without question though, Ant is the defacto standard for open source Java builds, and rightly so.
What's with all this whining about Litestep being so buggy or limited? I've been using Litestep for nearly two years, on Win98, WintNT *and* Win2K (home, work, laptop) even, and I don't have any problems like this.
It's not even the latest version of Litestep:
litestep.exe: 0.24.5
tasks.dll : 0.80
desktop.ddl : 1.95
popup.dll : R9.3
hotkey.dll : 1.25
lsapi.dll : 1.72
Other than having to boot into windows to install new software (a step that's not really necessary all the time anyway), and haven't lost any windows functionality, and my computer (and especially my shell) crashes much less often.
Litestep is sweet.
The Florida Sec. of State is basically asking the court to overturn her certification anyway--she only accepted *one* of the three hand-counts.
Eiffel (French)
Prolog (French)
C++ (Danish)
I'm sure there are many others.
While free distribution is a great marketing tool....what does it say about the product itself? Frankly, it says that the product...has no value.
and
The first, makes the fundamental capitalistic mistake, assuming price == value.
The second is just so far out there I can't even begin to explain whats wrong with it.
http://www.braveidea.com/ABCMetric.html
ABC is a metric of code size/complexity that counts the number of assignments, branches and conditionals.
BraveIdea has got ABC calculators for Java, C and C++. One could probably work one out for other langauges as well.
The difference here is that big tobacco spent lots of time, money and marketing know-how to figure out how to best sell poison to people.
It's as is a software company went out and marketed an insecure, buggy operating system as an "enteprise solution", all the while knowing that it exposed users to all sorts of risks...
perhaps we've got a lawsuit here ;)
Making it a crime to "create a virus" is very bad idea.
Releasing a virus, esp. with the intent of causing harm is a different story, however...
Hey, while I'm at it, www.thebrain.com is a similar graph viewer.
The Inxight applet is certainly cleaner, though.
The link above (excerpting net.wars?) attributes this notion to the alt.culture.usenet FAQ.
- rod