Ever since I discovered Make (25+ years ago) I have been searching for a good build system. I have used everything from Configure and Make (talk about icing on a mud pie) to JAM and now Ant and Maven.
I keep going back and trying Maven again when they do a new release. It is such a good idea that I keep going back in the hopes that the implementation and documentation will finally live up to that promise. And I think a good number of people stay with Maven because it is such a good idea that they persevere and endure the slings and arrows of outrageous documentation and implementation. Alas, each time I come away frustrated.
The Maven repository concept is pure genius. And in fact, the implementation works well enough that I use it in connection with Apache's Ivyto do dependency management.
What is Ivy? A set of dependency management tasks used by Ant to pull down and access the appropriate jar or other dependencies needed by your project. I won't go into a tutorial about Ivy since there are more than a few out there. But the project itself is available at http://ant.apache.org/ivy/. it does suffer from some of the same documentation issues that Maven does but between the online forums and other peoples blog posts you can usually figure something out pretty quickly.
In the following few posts I will be discussing how I use Ivy in connection with Ant to produce a fairly clean build system with minimal bootstrap requirements.
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