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

This isn't so much an answer as a question. ANT is the standard way of building Java. It works well with Java, the myriad of Java tools out there and with Cruise Control. So why would you want to try anything else?

Unless you have an edge case that ANT doesn't cover, then I'd recommend you stick with ANT.

Of course I'd be happy for a more knowledgeable person to point out why my attitude is stupid and why there is a good case for looking at alternatives ;)

Answer 2

jmk. It's primitive, but so small that you can embed it in a source .tar.gz file and barely change its size.

Answer 3

If you're starting a new project you may want to look into maven. It's kinda hard intially, but it handles a bunch of stuff for you including dependencies.

If you already have a project which you want to make a build file for, then I don't have any recommendations apart from the aforementioned ant.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Ant and Maven are definitely the two standards. If you're already familiar with Ant and want the dependency management that comes with Maven, you might take a look at Ivy.

One thing both Ant and Maven lack is true control structures in your build scripts. There are plugins you can download for Ant that provide some of this control, but (again, if you're already familiar with Ant) you may take a look at Gant which is a Groovy wrapper for Ant.

Answer 6

I like to use ant with ant4eclipse. This allows me to set up dependencies in eclipse, do development builds and testing in eclipse, and do continuous builds using ant.