Build tools are one of those things every developer depends on and few enjoy thinking about, until something breaks. This DenverJUG meetup took a close look at Savant, an open-source build tool built on the lessons learned from Make, Ant, Maven, and Gradle, aiming to solve some of the recurring headaches those tools are known for.
The first part of the session covered the fundamentals of what any build tool needs to do to get a project from source code to a shippable artifact, and how Savant’s approach compares to the more established options in that space. We talked through some of the common pitfalls teams run into with build tooling in general, and how a fresh design can avoid repeating them.
The second half was hands-on, walking through setting up a real project from scratch: wiring up dependencies on third-party libraries, letting the build tool manage them, and building out a basic plugin to extend the tool’s behavior. Seeing the workflow live, rather than just hearing about it, made the concepts click for a lot of attendees.
It’s always useful to step back and look at build tooling with fresh eyes every so often, since the workflow is so foundational to everything else a team does.
Thanks to everyone who came out, and to the local sponsors who help make DenverJUG meetups possible.