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Labels: VirtualAnt

Recently an engineer asked me this question -

'What kind of a tool is Virtual Ant? Is it some sort of debugging tool or testing tool for build scripts or a glorified editor of some sort? How would you classify this thing?'


Here is my answer to that. Up till now you have always thought of developing software as consisting of these steps -

1. First you go read some books, documentation, etc to learn about the language or library you want to use. This is usually a continuous process since libraries usually contain huge amounts of classes/methods and method parameters, so you always have to keep looking at the documentation constantly while coding.


2. Then you write some code.


3. Then you write some tests for your code.


4. Then you debug the errors you found during the tests.


5. Back to step 1.

With Virtual Ant we are releasing a new breed of tools where instead of doing the above steps, you just go ahead and do what you want to do. There is no need to write any code. No need to test either , since you always know exactly what going on. No need to debug since errors are obvious.

As for the documentation, it has been our goal from the very beginning that we want to make sure that you never, ever have to look at it. If you know absolutely nothing about build tools, you can go from know zero to complete knowledge within a couple of minutes.

The slide below from one of my presentations on Virtual Ant should help make the picture clearer-

Development with Virtual Ant

Note that Virtual Ant is just the first of a new breed of tools coming out of Placid.

Labels: VirtualAnt