Apache to incubate its first Ruby Project: Buildr - Ruby Build System for Java Projects

by Sebastien Auvray on Nov 01, 2007 |

Buildr is a simple and intuitive build system for Java projects. After 10 months of development and a lot of positive feedback, it will be incubated by the Apache Foundation, which will be opening its doors to its first Ruby project.

While some are still fighting to migrate their project from Ant to Maven2, Buildr is making its way. It has been some time since our review of Buildr, "The build system that doesn't suck", and the public feedback has been positive:

Buildr is what we're using for this and future projects. There's a lot to be said about Buildr, but for now let's just say that it gives you a hammer to work with; Maven assigns you a construction contractor.

Overall I believe that Buildr is a much more likely to become the defacto ruby build language, than Raven. If simply because of the active community that Raven seems to lack. So if you are up to replacing the trainwreck that is Maven 2 then I would encourage you to look into Buildr.

Since our review there have been several new features, such as:

Support for Hibernate XDoclet and SchemaExport tasks.
JDepend UI for seeing depenencies across all projects.
Cobertura test coverage tasks.
TestNG support.
Idea project files generation.
Buildfile created form existing Maven project POM.
ANTLR support.

The Buildr Talk google group has been seeing a good level of activity. Assaf Arkin and Buildr Team have been active in responding to user requests. Today this potential has been recognized as Apache is now incubating the project. This is also a good news for Ruby: with Buildr, Ruby has gotten its long awaited entrance to Apache.

Our previous coverage concluded that "We think it would be interesting to see how Maven and Buildr perform head-to-head." With both Maven and Buildr in the Apache Foundation, the competition is open, let's hope it won't end in a family quarrel.

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Community comments

I see this going nowhere by Marc Stock Posted

Re: I see this going nowhere by Loc NGuyen Posted

I see this going nowhere by Marc Stock

I'm all for replacing ANT and Maven but I just don't see Java developers signing up en masse for a build tool that requires them to know & use Ruby. Why should I bother with that? I'd rather use ANT than have to learn Ruby or use something else entirely like GANT.

Anyway, it's a good idea but just the wrong implentation.

Re: I see this going nowhere by Loc NGuyen

The problem is your reason for seeing this as a failure is based on your own hostility towards learning a new language. There's more than a few Java heads out there who want to learn something new, especially if it's a step in the right direction. So Buildr doesn't need to be accepted en masse, just see consistent growth