ant4eclipse 0.5 review

ant4eclipse project provides a set of Ant tasks that can be used to integrate Eclipse configurations into Ant buildscripts We all

License: Eclipse Public License File size: 0K Developer: Nils Hartmann

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ant4eclipse project provides a set of Ant tasks that can be used to integrate Eclipse configurations into Ant buildscripts

We all know this situation: the developers of a team are using the Eclipse IDE to code their apps, to compile their apps, to version, to deploy, and to run their apps. No problems so far. But as soon as you want to set up something like a continuous build system which runs outside of Eclipse you also need a build process that is independent of Eclipse. Usually you will use Ant and some other tools to define your automatic build process. Fine. But unfortunately Ant cannot use any of Eclipse's configurations, such as classpathes, launcher or team project sets. Although everything has been nicely configured already inside the IDE, it has to be redone in those external Ant build files. And even worse: it has to be reconfigured each time a developer makes changes in Eclipse. As always with redundant data, the challange is to keep Eclipse and Ant configurations in sync. But how about avoiding redundancy in the first place? This is where ant4eclipse comes into play...

The aim of the ant4eclipse project is to avoid (or at least: to reduce) the redundancy of Eclipse and Ant configurations. More precisly: it consists of Ant tasks that are able to read and work with some of Eclipse's configuration files. With these tasks you're able to:

Setup classpathes as defined in Eclipse' .classpath-file
checkout complete workspaces as it's possible with the Team Project Set feature of eclipse
run your Java applications as you have defined them in an Eclipse Launch Configuration

With all these tasks you're able to create a complete automatic build system that starts with checking out all required projects from CVS, builds all projects in the correct order with classpath settings as specified in Eclipse, and to launch your applications as they are specified in Eclipse. And the best of it: if you or someone else changes a configuration in Eclipse, those changes are immediately visible to your buildfiles - without changing one line of code!

Requirements:
ant4eclipse currently runs with JDK 1.4 and JDK5.
It is built and tested against ant 1.6.
We're recommending the use of Ant contrib tasks, to fully utilize the power of ant4eclips

What's New in This Release:
This release adds support for building Eclipse plugin projects to ant4eclipse.