Dynamic Build Languages

"Harnessing the power of magic..."

Build Tools

What's the current state of play?

ant

programming in xml big ball of ant few conventions lots of rope to hang yourself hard to refactor ill-conceived

maven

too much voodoo not enough docs simple things are simple moderate things are really hard (write a plugin) hard things are virtually impossible kind of buggy good conventions but hard to diverge from the norm declarative model is too strict appeals to the less experienced

rake

testing your build? need a first class language file dependency - what changed? do it anyway not optimal speed auto checking of timestamps separate the definition of dependencies - who depends on me? auto include of rake files easy factoring builtin namespaces plugins in ruby simple

capistrano for java deployment

posix only - no windows peepcode - building ubuntu -ssh

convincing management?