Flaka

Version 1.01 Released

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:25:03 +0000

Version 1.01 has been released today. Please checkout the following download packages:

ant-flaka.jar – this is the jar file that needs to be plugged into Ant. See also the manual how to do this.
flaka.zip – the development package. Only required when building ant-flaka.jar from scratch again.
flaka.pdf – 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.

About Page updated

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:35:50 +0000

Just updated page about to show the current status of this project which is still beta.

Theme updated

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:09:08 +0000

The theme of this site has been updated to match the general theme of my site häfelinger IT. Nevertheless, a big thanks is going to the provider of the former Fix Blix theme which was and still is, looking sensational good.

Source Code Uploaded

admin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:15:36 +0000

The initial source code has been uploaded. All unit and other tests are working fine. However, some glitches are still there. A nasty part is the consistence of attribute names and behaviour. This has to be reworked and changed. In order to build the project, Flaka is actually required to do so. Cause no Flaka artifact has not been released yet, building is not possible (except by writing the build file from scratch). However, build.xml gives some idea how a build file based on flaka will look like.

Manual is Wikiized

admin — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:06:20 +0000

Part of the manual is already available at the inofficial project home page at Google Code.

About Flaka

admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:32:01 +0000

In the world of Java, build scripts are traditionally written in Ant and nowadays Maven.

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.