There is definately a group of people that are a bit sick of Ant. This is a general “I don’t want to code in XML” problem too. Some are making the leap to Maven, with all of its b# builds. Others are just going back to the basics.
Philip Crow has just added Java::Build to CPAN.
He writes:
“Java/Build version 0.01
=====================
In my shop, we grew tired of using Ant for builds. We wanted to script,
and as the O’Reilly book on the subject points out at length, Ant is not
a scripting language. We wanted variables, loops, conditionals, and
subroutines, to name a few things. Eventually we decided to move to a
Perl based build system. This is the result of that work.
Ant provides one essential feature:
It uses only one JVM
In our builds, this issue is only important for compiling. All of the
other tasks are uncommon enough that starting a new JVM for each one is
not prohibitively expensive. (It is possible to add to Java::Build::JVM to
use its JVM for additional tasks, but we haven’t needed to yet.)
By using Java::Build::JVM, you get one JVM which you can keep using
for compilation throughout your script.
Java::Build::Tasks provides some useful helper functions. None of them
are essential, but they seem to make our scripts easier to write and more
consistent. The tasks currently include: jar, signjar, read_prop_file,
update_prop_file, build_file_list, and what_needs_compiling (the later uses
time stamps to decide which class files are missing or stale).”
