Oh wow, that’s four hours of my life I won’t get back.

Four hours trying to figure out why the hell my changes to .java source files weren’t showing up in the compiled binaries, debugging an unholy mess of ant XML files, before I finally realised how badly ant’s dependency checking sucks … Then 5 minutes of googling for ‘ant sucks’ and I find two excellently written rants (the second seems to have since vanished off the face of the ‘net, but was at ) which confirm my discovery.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Anything which uses XML as a domain-specific language should have already set the alarm bells ringing, but my excitement at learning something new initially blotted out the dull headache caused by hacking in XML.  Bah!