What are some good java make utilities?

Question

I\'m looking for a make utility for building large java programs. I\'m aware of ANT already, but want to see what else is available.

Ideally, it should be able to handle

Answer 1

Well, obviously, there's the classic make (make, gmake, nmake) utilities, there's also (I think) some build systems written in Ruby, or maybe Python. They aren't Java specific, rather just scriptable build systems.

But ANT has been the leader of the pack pushing 8-9 years now, and in terms of the basics, it's pretty easy to get started with.

Back in the day, make from particularly horrible for compiling java because it was typically invoking the javac compiler for each file individually. ANT doesn't suffer from this, and, perhaps, make could be modified to not do that. But it was one of the elements of ANT that made it so popular. It was simply fast.

I appreciate that ANT may not be the perfect solution, but it sure it practical.