What do you think about this build tool? I'm thinking of migrating from maven2 to raven (my poms are getting bigger and bigger), but I'd like to hear some opinions first.
Thanks!
@andre:
Thank's for writing but I was actually looking for real experiences using raven. Anyway, the fact that nobody wrote is an indicator by itself (it seems few people are using it)
pom growth is a problem that everybody faces w/ maven I guess, but maven is at least maintained (2.1. just around the corner) and the raven project looks pretty dead to me. No updates this year and the mailinglist archives are also very small. It looks to me as it's too risky to switch your build process to a tool w/o a living community. Not quite the answer you wanted I guess, but my 2 cents.
I don't know anything about raven.
You should check out plain old rake, which lets you create very powerful tasks.
I've also heard about sake, which is just like rake tasks but system-wide, instead of being only available inside one of your projects.
They may not be specialized for Java, but they sure beat the hell out of plain old bash or (heaven forbid) batch scripts.
I haven't used either Raven or Buildr, but I have heard good things about the latter. In this blog article by Assaf Arkin, there is a nice case study: a 5,443 line, 52 file Maven configuration was reduced to 485 lines of Buildr. And, even though everybody says "Ruby is slow", Buildr was 2-6x faster than Maven.
Also, unlike Raven, Buildr seems to still be maintained: it is currently in the incubator stage as an official Apache project.