Maiden is a simple build system for writing build tasks and other common development tasks.
At Clock we live and breath PHP, we love it! Every technical member of staff has a solid understanding of PHP and is setup to code PHP. All the web sites/applications, all the tools, as much as possible we code in PHP.
Previously we have used PHING to build, install, deploy, etc, but when your targets get more advanced, writing and debugging becomes really hard and really time consuming. This approach didn't make any sense! Everyone has the tools to write and debug PHP and yet we were programming in XML. Also our QA tools couldn't be used to ensure that our PHING/ANT build targets were valid and of a decent quality.
Maiden aims to keep all of your project code in a common language. If you have PHP tools and classes that your project uses then your build targets can also take advantage of these. You can even use PHPUnit to test your build scripts.
Another advantage of Maiden is that your build files benefit from all the power of PHPs language constructs; abstraction, inheritance, namespaces, the std library, you can use them all. All this means you write less code, but produce better quality and more powerful build targets.
cd /usr/share/php
sudo git clone git://github.com/PabloSerbo/maiden.git
cd maiden
sudo git submodule init
sudo git submodule update
sudo ./maiden install
maiden -h # Show help
maiden -l # List all targets in ./Maiden.php
maiden <target> # Runs a <target>
Licenced under the New BSD License