I decided to prepare Arousa after a few conversations here and in Prague. I remember talking about using Ivy for Xml dependency management but the idea never seemed to catch up.

Arousa is both a tool and a set of templates for managing dependencies in document transformation projects using Apache Ant and Apache Ivy. As a tool, Arousa provides a script for managing template projects with a prebuilt integration with Ivy. The provided templates try to serve as a set of examples to ease start with Ivy in this type of projects.

The purpose of this document is to evaluate Ivy as a suitable dependency manager for document and data transformation projects.

I’ll use Arousa to introduce Ivy and as a mean to simplify the adoption. We’ll iterate over Ivy concepts, their possible use cases and check the plausibility. We’ll refer to the prepared examples and at the end we’ll evaluate the results and conclusions.