Pre-canned tasks that require the least amount of configuration, keeping the build script DRY and simple.A simple way to specify projects, and build large projects out of smaller sub-projects.

I’ve cleaned up & migrated the Vamosa build process from 768 lines of Ant build.xml to 28 lines of Buildr. The positive side effect for me as a java user is that I learn a little ruby, and that’s easy but lots of fun… :-) I could write pages of rants explaining all the problems we ran into and we still ended up with thousands of lines of XML. The biggest mistake afterward was to migrate to Maven2. We used to rely on Ant, with a fairly extensive set of scripts.

That’s still the strongest sell: it builds everything I need, and as I’ve needed more, I just got things working without a lot of fuss. If you think about it, the question isn’t “Why use Buildr?”, it’s really “Why use anything else?” The advantages afforded by Buildr are so substantial, I really can’t see myself going with any other tool, at least not when I have a choice. And of course, we wanted it to be fast, reliable and have outstanding dependency management.

But also something we can easily extend for those one-off tasks, with a language that’s a joy to use. We wanted something that’s simple and intuitive to use, so we only need to tell it what to do, and it takes care of the rest. Apache Buildr is a build system for Java-based applications, including support for Scala, Groovy and a growing number of JVM languages and tools.

Apache ant build tool core