Apache Buildr


Buildr is an open-source build system mainly intended to build Java applications. It gives the developer a full-blown scripting language while writing their build scripts, which are usually missing in XML-based building environments such as Apache Ant or Apache Maven.

Overview

Buildr is based on Ruby's build system Rake, and uses Ruby as a scripting language. It uses several project automation idioms from Maven like automated artifact management. As opposed to the more imperative style of build systems like Ant, Buildr takes a more declarative approach in describing the project automation logic.
Though Buildr's general philosophy is similar to Maven, it uses Ruby's scripting possibilities to provide a more flexible and customizable programming model. The user writes a Ruby build script, declaring a project, its sub-projects, artifacts, dependencies, packaging rules, etc. Based on these declarations, a list of standard targets are provided to compile or package the project, upload a prepared package to a remote repository, clean up the build results, run tests and so on. Hooks are provided to execute custom Ruby code before or after the standard targets, allowing the user to comfortably override any defaults and further specify the behavior of the standard targets. New, completely user-written targets can be added.

Supported technologies

While being mainly designed for Java, Buildr also knows how to invoke compilers for Groovy or Scala. It is also easily extendible with any custom tasks to invoke any third compiler, making it a universal, general-purpose build system. As compared with writing custom plug-ins for Ant, Ruby's flexibility and rich library make it easier and quicker to extend Buildr in any desired way.
Buildr also comes with out-of-box support technologies like Cobertura, Emma, JUnit, TestNG, JBehave, JMock. Integration with Ant is also provided.