Supporting multi-project configurations

[jose....@gmail.com]

Hi,

I've seen the todo list. I'd like to see the groovy feature a lot (a
new world of possibilities). But in a more short-term approach I would
like to see multi-project support. I mean configuring an EAR project
with multiple EJB/WAR/JAR sub-projects (inside different folders) and
getting metrics for it as a whole or per target. Do you see it
feasible?

Regards,

[John Brugge]

Jose,

On the topic of Groovy, yes, that would change the playing field completely. I'm also intrigued by Buildr, but I'm not sure in either case if I'm ready to go into that territory yet. For one, I don't know Groovy or Ruby very well, and while the learning curve I'm sure is gentle, I'm interested in just how far you can get with the simplicity of Ant. Ant is definitely limiting, but within those limitations I like to see what can happen.

On the topic of multi-project support, while I have some ideas for that, there is nothing in the works right now. I agree that it would be very useful to see the feedback results for a collection of components, with the ability to drill down to individual projects. The idea for Glean actually came from a project I was on where I had put together a build process to gather feedback for the 15+ components that made up our application, and in the end it wasn't that pretty. My goal with Glean was to start over and focus on getting it right for a single component project first, and build from there.

Getting it to work with multiple projects would certainly be easier with a dynamic language in the script, but as I said above, I'm a little hesitant to make that step. Then again, maybe that is something that is just another optional element to Glean, where people who want that support (multi-project feedback, in this case) are willing and able to take on the dependency of Groovy. I did it for the Dashboard because that seemed like a really compelling need, something that I have certainly wanted to have for a long time,

I hope that helps. If you have any suggestions of particular things you'd like to see for collective feedback on multiple projects, I'm open to suggestions and ideas.

Thanks,

John

[Jose Noheda]

Hi,

I don't know if you already know Gant. I once considered it to replace ant scripts though in the end we decided to build a Java app. I think the transition from ant scripts to Gant should be affordable and from there on groovy would be available. I'm not really an expert in groovy/gant but I've worked with ant extensively (and nearly all the apps that glean integrates) so I could help you a little if you consider it worth the effort.

My intuition tells me that (I haven't looked at it) the code done for the Dashboard should apply very well for multi-project configurations as well. May be half the work is already done.

Regards

[John Brugge]

Jose,

Thanks for your offer. I've glanced at Gant before, but never tried it, and don't feel like I know enough of the Groovy gestalt to compare it with the AntBuilder approach (without trying out both).

If you want to try out some ideas, go ahead. I've got vacation and some other commitments coming up, so I don't have as much time to put into this right now as I would like to, but I don't want to slow down any other explorations.

John