Pill is a software build system that relieves the pain caused by Make, Ant and Maven. In contrast with these systems:
- Pill uses an imperative execution model. You control what executes, in what order.
- Scripts are written in Java. This makes it easy to learn and extend.
- Pill keeps its opinions to itself. Contrast this with Maven, where you are in for a world of pain unless you adhere to "The Maven Way".
- Scripts for building Pill itself.
- Basic unit tests.
- Querying/downloading Maven artifacts from any Maven repository.
- Build script for a sample project.
- Ability to download dependencies from arbitrary locations (e.g. Sourceforge, Google Code).
- Ability to deploy to Maven Central.
- Transitive dependency resolution.
- IDE plugins for Netbeans and Eclipse.
- A declarative project model. It is our belief that declarative formats, such as XML, are meant for computer consumption, not for human beings. You are certainly welcome to layer a declarative format on top of Pill, but we don't go out of our way to provide one.
- Following the herd. We avoid technologies that suffer from conceptual problems (e.g. ORM Impedence Mismatch) regardless of how popular they might be. In our experience, this leads to a simpler design and cleaner code.
- Get involved on the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/pill-users
- Fork the code, and contribute pull requests.