Want

Want is a Delphi-friendly build management tool.

Want was inspired by the Jakarta Ant tool, but tweaked to make it fast and Delphi-friendly. Want is written in Delphi.

History

I (Juanco Añez) wrote most of the core classes of Want during the Spring of 2001. See the  Want History page for  the details about how it happened.

The Name

When I broke out of the Dante project (see the history page) I started to think about a name for the tool I'd continue to develop. One of the first ideas that came to mind  was "WAnt", for "Windows Ant". I quickly rejected the name because it didn't fit a tool that would also run on Linux, using Kylix, and probably on several other platforms through Free Pascal.  Then, I quickly came back to to the name:

  want clean
  want compile
  want installer
  want changelog

It seemed just too comfortable to invoke the  tool telling it what you "want", and so the name stayed.

Availability

The current version of Want is 0.2.10 and you can download it here. The source is included, and licensed under the GPL.

There are very few docs, but you may be able to get along with the binary and the Ant Docs -- with which Want is fairly compatible. You can also take a look at the source code for the tasks in the <want>/src/tasks directory to know what functions they provide (their code is really simple).

Examples

For a better view of the following scripts, you should download them to your hard disk and use your favorite editor; browsers will present the XML in ways different from the original text.

A copy of the Want want.xml script used to build, test, and package Want itself be found here.

A copy of the want.xml script used to build DUnit distributions with Want can be found here.

Screenshots

This is a screenshot of Want building itself:

 

This is how an unsuccessful build may look like:

~o~


$Id: index.template.html,v 1.3 2002/01/29 21:55:00 juanco Exp $