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I was wondering about the best way to manage projects dependencies from ant. What are the pros and cons of the Maven Ant task and of Ivy?
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Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool, whereas Apache Ivy is only a dependency management tool, highly integrated with Apache Ant™, the popular build management tool.
With no specific settings, Ivy uses the maven 2 repository to resolve the dependencies you declare in an Ivy file.
Apache Ivy is most commonly used to resolve dependencies and copy them to the lib directory of a project. After dependencies have been copied, a build no longer depends on Apache Ivy.
Apache Ivy is a very popular and very powerful dependency management tool used to manage dependencies in ANT based projects in the same fashion, how Apache Maven manages dependencies.
Since what you're wanting to do is add dependency management to an existing Ant project, that's precisely what Ivy's designed to do. Dependency management is a big part of Maven, but far from all of it. Maven is more of a project-oriented tool that does several other things in addition to dependencies. It would be worth considering if you were planning to migrate to Maven and use additional Maven features as well, but it's a bit much if all you'd use it for is to spin off Ant.
Your type of dependencies and your expectations for how they behave will also make a difference. Pulling third-party dependencies is almost trivial in Maven, while Ivy excels in rebuilding your own dependent components. In either case, the tools won't provide decent build, versioning, and repository policies, those are still up to you and needed to get the configuration right.
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