Steve: Developing on the Edge - AntFlow: Workflow in Ant

Steve: Developing on the Edge

Thoughts on development, Web-services, technology and mountains.

21Nov
Sun2004

AntFlow: Workflow in Ant

I have mixed feelings about these extended-Ant thingys. On one side, its fascinating to see workflows being built on Ant, and it shows the pent-up need for a good OSS workflow system. I almost publicly denounced GridAnt for being an inappropriate use of Ant.

On the other, Ant's core architecture is about the build process. We lack the stability, persistence and fault tolerance of a long-life system, or the ability to declare exception handling rigorously.

AntFlow is a workflow system; looks like it listens for folders and when files go in you can have events work on them. Event handling is done in Ant with extra tasks for exceptioning. If you know Ant, you'll be able to use AntFlow.

Irony: Maven reports on the site :)

Posted by steve at 19:22

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On 22 November 2004 at 12: 25 pjr commented:

This pattern is old but still useful - I first came across it for PDF distilling on HPUX

We supply an In-tray transport with NetKernel which lets you register a directory into which dropped files will fire up a NetKernel pipeline.

I hesitate to say but NK has all the exception handling infrastructure that Ant lacks, plus lots more.

But then when you get round to actually doing something with it you'll find that out won't you Stevo ;-)

On 23 November 2004 at 20: 50 pjr commented:

I forgot to mention - creating a directoy based pipeline is really fun. Especially if you use the Gnome file manager (realtime instant updates of directory contents) to view each directory - watching a file pipeline through the linked directories (dir out = dir in for the next stage etc) is cool.

Terrible way to build a pipeline but fun!