Question

Is it really advantageous to move to Rake from ant?

Anyone migrated from ant and find something monumental?

FYI: Current environment is Ant for J2ME builds

Answer 1

I would say yes, but I have a different perspective than a Java-environment guy, because I’m a .NET-environment guy. I had written and maintained a non-trivial build script (clean, generate-assembly-info, build, test, coverage, analysis, package) in msbuild (MS’ XML-driven NAnt effort) and it was very painful:

• XML isn’t friendly; it’s very noisy
• No-one else on the team was interested in learning it to the point of performing more, and more useful, automations; so high bus factor (ie, if I get hit by a bus, they’re stuck with it)
• It did not lend itself to refactoring or improvement – it was one of those ‘touch-at-your-peril’ things, you know?
• It needed custom C# tasks to be written to run the various tools the build needed (though to be fair, often these are written by the vendors)

In about a work-week’s worth of my time (got to love empty offices at Christmas time!), I’ve learned enough ruby+rake to replace the whole thing with a shorter (in terms of LOC) script with slightly more functionality, and more understandability (I hope, anyhow; haven’t had it reviewed yet).

It benefits from: – It’s a new language, but a real language. My team-mates like learning new languages, and this, while a thin excuse, is still an excuse 😉 This might mitigate the bus-factor if I’m right. – It’s a short hop (I gather) from here to capistrano, the automated/remote/distributed deployment tool from the RoR world. Despite being an MS-stack shop, we’re gonna be using that in combination with IIS7 finally having a CLI config tool.

So, yeah. Your mileage may vary, but it was worth it for me.