Re: [Javaweb-people] build tools

[Etienne M. Gagnon]

Nic Ferrier wrote:

> I've been trying to improve the java makefile that I wrote and I'm
> not getting very far. I'm frustrated and annoyed.
>
> I'm rapdily coming to the conclusion that the only succesfull way to
> build java is to use Ant.


Finally!  Somebody who's starting to see the mismatch between Make and the Java 
compilation model.  :-)

Ant, as you say, is not ideal.  But, unfortunately, it's the only serious Free 
tool available (to my knowledge!) that does a good job at compiling Java.

Ant allows to to exclude files from your compilation set.  You can have a 
"broken-files" text file listing the name of classes you don't want to compile, 
one per line, then write:

    <javac
      destdir="${classes.dir}"
      srcdir="${src.dir}"
      bootclasspath="${src.dir}:${classes.dir}"
      classpath="${src.dir}:${classes.dir}"
      includeAntRuntime="no"
      includeJavaRuntime="no"
      excludesfile="broken-classes"
      />

(This is extracted from Sablepath's build.xml file).

I do not think that there'll be a nice way to integrate Java within the GNU 
auto* tools.  The Java dependency/compilation scheme is just too different from 
traditional languages.

On the other hand, I do think that there is a nice opportunity to come up with a 
much better system than Ant.  I'll try to find a student to work on such a tool 
(and release it under a GNU license;-).  But this will take time...

Please give a look at the Sablepath CVS repository 
(http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/sablevm/sablepath-classes/).  It 
might give you some ideas.  Don't worry, I've sent the Copyright assignment 
paperwork for the Classpath (and therefore the Sablepath) build stuff.  It'll 
take a few days until it gets to Boston, but hopefully the pipeline won't be too 
slow after that.

Etienne

--
Etienne M. Gagnon                    http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
SableVM:                                       http://www.sablevm.org/
SableCC:                                       http://www.sablecc.org/