Boots' Straps

So, I've been writing on and off (well, more off than on recently) on this build system I call Bob. The core idea is, basically, to keep Ant's simplicity, and throw out rest of the ugly.

Its state is currently somewhere between "code slapped together" and "first alpha". But the first milestone has been achieved: Bob can bootstrap itself, i.e. it can wrap itself into an executable JAR only using its own executable JAR. Mind-bending.

Have a look at the entire Bob build class:

import com.github.wolfie.bob.action.Action;
import com.github.wolfie.bob.action.Jar;
import com.github.wolfie.bob.annotation.Target;

public class Default {
  @Target(defaultTarget = true)
  public Action build() {
    return new Jar("result/bob.jar").useDefaultManifestFile();
  }
}

This compiles and runs the build class, then compiles the project, slaps it into a JAR and throw in a manifest file for good measure. Next, the only thing I then need to write in my terminal is "bob" and out comes...

wolfie> bob
[Jar] Wrote /Users/wolfie/Documents/workspace/Bob/result/bob.jar
[Bob] Build complete
wolfie>

Shazam!

More to come. But this is what I've got today; shazam.