On 08/11/2008, at 5:52 AM, Mike Schrag wrote:
>>> Which would require jar-based frameworks, but jar-based frameworks
>>> don't support nested jars.
>>
>> Why do you need a nested jar? If you have a description of
>> transitive dependencies, couldn't you just download everything
>> required to build the project and put it together? Do you have a
>> use case where this solution doesn't work?
> An issue of perspective, I suppose ... There's something nice about
> being able to distribute a framework that has its dependencies
> packaged nicely inside of it. I recognize there are definitely
> potential conflict issues with this, though.
sure.
>>> Q has a WOBootstrap that does, but we're still talking about
>>> changing the way a large number of people deploy their apps. Not
>>> to mention we have to then integrate Ivy with WOLips, not to
>>> mention it has to work in Eclipse also.
Sure. I can't speak for ivy, but installing m2eclipse or q4e is pretty
painless.
>>> That and I'm not even really sold on jar frameworks,
I personally preferred jar frameworks because until more recently you
could only have one set of frameworks active at a time. But you're not
limited to jars with maven as Henrique mentioned.
>>> though the better split install build.xml makes it slightly better
>>> I guess. I still come back to "make it easy for people" ....
>>> Ivy's certainly an option, and I'm not at all
>>> ruling it out, but I'm always sort of skeptical of the final
>>> result of these things actually being a better experience for
>>> endusers of the system.
>>
>> I'm not trying to sell Ivy or Maven Ant Tasks, because I have never
>> used any of them. But I'm a long time Maven user. I cannot imagine
>> how people can develop nowadays without a good tool for dependency
>> management. And when I say dependency management, I mean all
>> dependencies of a project. Not only WO frameworks. If I was an Ant
>> user, I'll prefer to have a complete solution for the dependency
>> management problem, even if I have some trouble to learn it in the
>> beginning.
> The problem is that all these tools suck ... The ramp up time is
> totally obnoxious. I feel like I'm a reasonably smart dude, and
> every time people start explaining Maven, my eyes glaze over.
At the risk of repeating the experience... (just some food for thought)
> I'm sure once you get over the hump it does its job quite well, but
> WO itself is so complicated that I think we really need to focus on
> making the "zero state" of the tools help the process, and telling
> people they need to understand Ivy or Maven dependency management in
> order to deploy their apps is this huge uphill battle we shove into
> the experience. I don't have a good answer to all these issues ....
> I mean, I really don't want to reinvent Maven (or Ivy), but on the
> flip side, I want WebObjects developers to both be able to start
> working relatively easily as well as support power users. Oh well ...
You might be able to have both. As you said - and we all know it -
you're a reasonably smart guy. But we're hearing "it can't be done"
again ;-)
If it can't be done you can stop reading ... but *if* it can...
Why can't you provide a high-level view/editor to an underlying
dependency-management system like maven? As I understand it, you're
already allowing people to maintain/edit the woframeworks they depend
on - including the ordering and such of each. So that sounds to me
like all you're doing (in effect) is shuffling entries like the
following via a gui, no?
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<artifactId>foo</artifactId>
<groupId>foo</groupId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Is that so hard to create a wizard for?
Ant can easily utilise the dependencies from maven too:
http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/index.html
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin/index.html
with regards,
--Lachlan Deck
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