Buildr : Building Java using Ruby

My friend posted an interesting tool in PinoyJUG. It's called Buildr. Here's a description from their website.

"Buildr is a build system for Java applications. We wanted something that’s simple and intuitive to use, so we only need to tell it what to do, and it takes care of the rest. But also something we can easily extend for those one-off tasks, with a language that’s a joy to use. And of course, we wanted it to be fast, reliable and have outstanding dependency management."

Buildr is a Ruby application to compile/manage your Java projects. It's a drop-in replacement of Maven. It inherited most of the features of Maven and harnessed the power of Ruby.

After reading about Builr, I decided to try it out. Here's my first impression...

If you have Maven in your machine, testing some sample builds is a breeze since it uses the same repository and project directory structure. What I noticed when creating a project is its simplicity. I believe it would be useful even for small projects.

It gets rid of those XML files which is a pain to maintain! Plus the build file is self-explanatory. Meaning, you don't have to figure out what the hell is the build file doing. It is also flexible in a sense that you can control the logic of building your project with Ruby. Definitely better than XML!

Inheriting from Maven, Buildr applies a similar concept when managing artifacts. It uses your local Maven repository. So if you know Maven it's a no-brainer to setup. =)