As part of my current job as a Revision Control Specialist (my exact title!) in the Configuration Management/Deployment Services department, I get exposed to quite a few things. Some of them I hope never have to develop for, or learn. Such as Uniface.
One tool I've been put in charge of is maintaining their Ant Build scripts. If you don't know what Ant is, I highly suggest you look it up. Even though it is all in Java, it has some merit. As their webpage says: Apache Ant is a Java based build tool. In theory it is kind of like make without make's wrinkles.
So far I have been really impressed with Ant. It even has the ability to run scripts written in other languages, supported in java by BSF. I have not had a chance to try this yet, but plan on doing it (and of course using perl, since perl is supported by BSF). One idea I had as a project, since Ant Build Scripts are all XML based, is to write my own ant build script runner in Perl, since each "task" in Ant is written in Java, and is either a core task, optional task, or hand written/downloaded. Of course, make it more perlyish at the same time, with perl specific tasks. Of course, this will probably become one of my other half started, never finished projects.
