It seems the build platform debate continues to heat up with Steven Devijver’s posting on the DZone entitled “What’s Wrong with Build Systems in Java Today?” where he previews a build platform that builds upon Ant and Maven 2 and adds, as he states:

Better-than-Maven 2 JAR and project dependency management, No XML, and Integration of Ant, Maven 2, Gant, Buildr, Rake, Grails, … projects in multi-project builds

Clearly, in the Java space, Ant is the de-facto build platform; consequently, the future of build languages will most likely need to leverage the extensive infrastructure in place to support Ant– dropping XML is key should you require a more imperative style of building things. Dependency management has always been a splintered solution ranging from Ivy to Maven’s declarative dependency framework to Ruby’s gems– all interesting and viable solutions, which makes his statement all the more interesting.

All in all, these are exciting times as dynamic languages are enabling a complete change in the way we define software builds, which will ultimately lead to tools that make building software (that is, compiling, testing, inspecting, deploying, etc) easier.