<p>Is it really advantageous to move to Rake from ant?</p>

<p>Anyone migrated from ant and find something monumental?</p>

<p>FYI: Current environment is Ant for J2ME builds</p>

[{'answer_id': 71723, 'author': 'auramo', 'author_id': 4110, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4110', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>You might want to check out <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/buildr/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">buildr</a> as well. It\'s a higher-level build-tool built on rake. IMHO it takes a lot of the good features from maven, and throws away the bad-ones. I haven\'t used it in anything big myself but I know people who have and are quite happy with it.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 90710, 'author': 'Peter Kelley', 'author_id': 14893, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/14893', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Another tool that you might want to check out is <a href="http://gant.codehaus.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Gant</a> if ant isn\'t meeting your needs. It adds full blown scripting support to ant but allows you to re-use your ant tasks as needed. It really depends on what you don\'t like about ant.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 123495, 'author': 'davetron5000', 'author_id': 3029, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3029', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Rake is great if you want:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Access to a real programming language; conditionals and loops are all dead-simple, compared to Ant (in which they are nigh-impossible)</li>\n<li>File format that is easy to read and can be syntax checked</li>\n<li>More intuitive/predictable assignment of values to variables</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Rake is bad for you because:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>You need to provide a lot basic of the tasks (like running javac, creating jar files, etc.) yourself.  Projects like <a href="http://raven.rubyforge.org/" rel="noreferrer">Raven</a> might help, but it seems geared toward auto-downloading dependencies and not so much automated a build/deploy process.  Plus, the documentation is a bit lacking.</li>\n<li>Most java tools that can be automated are done as Ant tasks, which aren\'t easily runnable from Rake; starting up the JVM can be annoying at build time</li>\n</ul>\n'}, {'answer_id': 401797, 'author': 'Peter Mounce', 'author_id': 20971, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/20971', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': "<p>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:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>XML isn't friendly; it's very noisy</li>\n<li>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)</li>\n<li>It did not lend itself to refactoring or improvement - it was one of those 'touch-at-your-peril' things, you know?</li>\n<li>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)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>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).</p>\n\n<p>It benefits from:\n  - 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.\n  - 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.</p>\n\n<p>So, yeah.  Your mileage may vary, but it was worth it for me.</p>\n"}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/71381', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/123/']