Remove Ant build, Use Maven only

Issue #14 resolved
Justin Richer created an issue

The use of Ant and Maven in parallel could lead to drift and disconnects between the two build systems. To the best of my knowledge, the project is not currently using anything special with the Ant build file that is not handled by Maven.

Additionally, the Ant build process requires packaging of library .jar files along with the repository, which accounts for much of the space used in the repository. Updating these .jar files causes further bloat as old revisions of the binary must be kept around for version control. Maven externalizes all of these dependencies.

Comments (7)

  1. Vladimir Dzhuvinov

    Yes, Maven does appear to have advantages. We've been using Ant since I don't know when and for a migration to Maven to happen we'll have to consider a number of things internally at NimbusDS and other people we work with. I suggest we keep the Ant build.xml for now, but we will definitely look at Maven in future.

    BTW, does Maven permit a JAR to be built with one or more tests that don't pass?

  2. Justin Richer reporter

    You can tell maven to skip tests entirely during the build process, but all automated build systems will have tests turned on by default. If any test fails, the whole build fails and the jar won't be produced. It's a safety check to make sure you're not releasing something that is broken.

  3. Justin Richer reporter

    Also, wanted to note that you don't have to migrate the rest of your build system to maven, since your existing ant scripts can easily incorporate the .jar that maven produces.

    But I will still contend that with an externally-published and externally-used library like this, these days, maven is really the way to go.

  4. Vladimir Dzhuvinov

    We recently decided to adopt maven for our internal projects, so you have my blessing to go ahead with removing the ant script and mavenising the library build :)

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