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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T09:11:02+00:00

I’m a student and i want make a build tool as a side project

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I’m a student and i want make a build tool as a side project for myself because none of the current build tools seem to attract me. There’s ant, but i really dislike looking at XML (i don’t know why, but i really don’t see the appeal of tags; it puts me off visually and cannot be made neat in my eyes). There’s maven, but i really don’t want to be working on a project just to have it fail all of a sudden (this is based on the research I’ve done where people say that there are times that maven fails to build all of a sudden. This could just be total BS but i’d rather not find out the hard way), plus there’s some XML involved. I really liked make, but it isn’t portable, and even though the chances of me using a non-Windows PC are next to nil, I am unfortunately, a computer science student who has been properly trained to always assume the worst case.

Currently, i am looking into Gradle. I’m still trying to figure it out (i am a really slow learner) but i like the syntax. It might also be beneficial to note that i am so shallow that i don’t really care about the back end stuff or any of the advanced features cause i don’t really understand dependency management and stuff just quite yet. All i care about is that the configuration syntax or make file looks clean, that it works without requiring internet access, absolute paths, or anything of the sort, and that it works consistently and doesn’t take too long. I believe that the syntax is important because, like all code, if it looks ugly, you won’t want to read it.

I want to make a build tool that is simple, functional, and portable (i’m gonna be running it off my External HDD with Java in it). I’d really appreciate any suggestions this community has to offer, such as “It really is better to just stick with ant or maven cause they work already” or “be sure to avoid make’s dependency issue”. This will just be a side project so i can work on my Java and maybe learn something new so even if i fail, i still might learn something new so no need to comment on that.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Here’s just an idea:

    ant is really not such a bad tool. Maybe you could consider building a front end for it that translates a DSL (Domain Specific Language) of your own design into ant’s XML, and hide the XML from your tool’s users?

    You may also want to take a look at Rake. Someone recently ranted in his blog about how terrible Maven is (and the debate goes on) and he much, much prefers Rake.

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