1. ant-flaka.jar – this is the jar file that needs to be plugged into Ant. Consider Flakas online manual on how to do this
2. flaka.zip – the development package suitable to build distributables from scratch
3. Flaka’s PDF Manual

You may also want to visit http://code.google.com/p/flaka further details on Flaka.

1. ant-flaka.jar – this is the jar file that needs to be plugged into Ant. Consider Flaka’s PDF manual on how to do this
2. flaka.zip – the development package suitable to build distributables from scratch
3. Flaka’s PDF Manual

You may also want to visit http://code.google.com/p/flaka further details on Flaka.

1. ant-flaka.jar – this is the jar file that needs to be plugged into Ant. Consider Flaka’s PDF manual on how to do this
2. flaka.zip – the development package suitable to build distributables from scratch
3. Flaka’s PDF Manual

You may also want to visit http://code.google.com/p/flaka further details on Flaka.

Here is what the ChangeLog says about the new release candidate ..

* updated to JUEL 2.2.1 (was 2.1.1-rc4)
* using ant-antunit (1.1) to run Ant based unit tests
* refactoring ant unit tests (test/test-*.xml)
*  redesigned to have elements re, glob, cmp,
   matches (legacy, deprecated) and attributes find, not and literally
* fixed bug in  to avoid partial matches.
* new distributable "ant-flaka-bare-${version}.jar" introduced - does
  not contain any inlined dependencies (as ant-flaka-${version}.jar) does.
*
 extended with  clause (warning: conflicting exceptions)

The mayor part of the work has been put into redesigning . Documentation about changes is rather spare at this moment. To get an idear of what can be done with , it’s best to study the associated (Ant) unit case.

User feedback is welcome and documentation is in progress.

Enjoy!

1. ant-flaka.jar – this is the jar file that needs to be plugged into Ant. See also the manual how to do this.
2. flaka.zip – the development package. Only required when building ant-flaka.jar from scratch again.
3. Flaka’s PDF Manual.

You may also want to visit the project’s hosted home at Google for further details on Flaka and this new release.

When it comes to write a build script using Ant, it feels like using a Shell script in a rather awkward language (XML). Each Ant task solves a particular problem. This is similar to a Shell where you have this small masterpieces like mkdir, cp, tar plus some control structures to eventually being able to put the one big thing together.

Writing a build script using a Shell is serious. And so it is using Ant. Ant does not provide you any abstraction how the project needs to be build. There is no underlying logic. In fact you, the author, need to know what to do. Step by step. Therefore, Ant scripts are large, notoriously difficult to understand, usually not portable (usuallyt they just work on the authors host) and each author uses a different set of targets and properties.

Maven on the other side provides a high abstraction of building a project. Instead of describing how the project needs to be build, just describe project details and reports you like to have and Maven figures out what needs to be done. This is probably the reason why Maven gains so much popularity.

Despite better knowledge I wrote that Maven figures out how a project needs to be build automatically. That’s actually not quite true. In fact, Maven only works fine when following conventions setup by the Maven team. When not “en route”, Maven gets difficult as well. For example, try to create a release package with Maven. At the end you find yourself using Ant again.

Flaka is a framework build on to of Ant. It’s main goal is to simplify the process of writing a build script. It comes with a high abstraction a la Maven while providing the natural power of Ant to escape from defaults.