Q: Why use Buildr instead of Ant or Maven?
If you think about it, the question isn’t “Why use Buildr?”, it’s really “Why use anything else?” The advantages afforded by Buildr are so substantial, I really can’t see myself going with any other tool, at least not when I have a choice.
We used to rely on Ant, with a fairly extensive set of scripts. It worked but was expensive to maintain. The biggest mistake afterward was to migrate to Maven2. I could write pages of rants explaining all the problems we ran into and we still ended up with thousands of lines of XML.
unknown:
With BuildR, your build files are written in a real language (you can use variables, methods, loops, containers), which is needed because building a product requires custom logic (code). The myth that Maven tries to sell is that it is all just declaring what you wants (via properties) and a “maven” creates everything for you. You need your own code.
That’s still the strongest sell: it builds everything I need, and as I’ve needed more, I just got things working without a lot of fuss.
The positive side effect for me as a java user is that I learn a little ruby, and that’s easy but lots of fun… :-)