Moving on to Ivy.

Maven has its share of success, at the same time it has some shortcomings. Many felt the Idea was right, the implementation was not. There were a few rants too. Project Ivy was started on that note. Today, Everyone is talking about Ivy and How Ivy can fix your woes from maven.

So, I began to test drive Ivy. Ivy has got pretty good documentation. And the edge over maven is, that you dont have to adapt your project to it (like maven). You can make ivy adapt to your project. All you need to start is a jar to put in your ant lib folder. The examples list a mighty hard way of starting with ivy - So I modified a little bit to get it easy and install ivy automatically. Also this can be used as a template build.xml file for starting from scratch :)

<!-- Use namespace even before bootstrap -->
<project xmlns:ivy="antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant" default="build" name="SarathPOC">
 <property file="build.properties" />

 <path id="compile.path">
  <fileset dir="${lib.dir}/compile" />
 </path>
 <path id="runtime.path">
  <path location="${build.dir}" />
  <fileset dir="${lib.dir}/compile" />
  <fileset dir="${lib.dir}/runtime" />
 </path>

 <target name="-download-ivy" unless="skip.download">
  <!-- Download directly (and skip if it exists or if instructed) -->
  <get src="http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/ivy/ivy/${ivy.install.version}/ivy-${ivy.install.version}.jar" dest="${ant.library.dir}\ivy.jar" usetimestamp="true" />
 </target>

 <target name="compile" depends="-download-ivy" description="Compile Project, Download Ivy Dependencies">
  <ivy:retrieve pattern="${lib.dir}/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" />
 </target>

 <target name="clean">
  <delete includeemptydirs="true" failonerror="false">
   <fileset dir="${build.dir}" />
   <fileset dir="${lib.dir}" />
  </delete>
 </target>

 <target name="build" depends="-download-ivy,clean,compile">
  <mkdir dir="${build.dir}" />
  <javac srcdir="${src.dir}" destdir="${build.dir}" classpathref="runtime.path" />
 </target>
</project>

Thats is it, Ivy is installed. If you want to download manually, you can go to the main site. It includes examples.

From here, you could jump start, understand dependency resolution. I am looking at these two for today. However, There is more to Ivy - mainitaing your repositories, Resolvers and Chaining them etc. May be after I get hooked in?