Do Ant Build in a GUI

[asanka]

Hi, I am Francis,

I am creating a GUI for Ant. Now I have created the gui and it
loads the build file and show it in a tree view. Also we can add &
delete nodes & attributes of the buildfile by just clicking a button
and save it to the hard disk.
Now I want to do the build process. I want to create a project
object, initialize it and execute. But there are many errors in
creating these objects.
If you can please help me.
Thank You!!

 

[Roedy Green]

Now I want to do the build process. I want to create a project
object, initialize it and execute. But there are many errors in
creating these objects.

Let us assume you have put the XML into a file.

If you spawn a separate JVM, you could do an exec and pass the file
name on the command line.
see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/exec.html


You then have the problem of setting up the SET environment, doing the
work of ANT.BAT before you spawn. You also have the problem of having
to set up all the platform specific stuff. The whole point of ANT is
your scripts should run unmodified on any platform. Ditto your GUI.

IIRC there are some notes on how to call ANT from within Java.

Failing that, perhaps you can run your GUI as some sort of ANT task
that then sneaks its script into place and restarts.

Worse comes to worst, you start yourself with bat file like this:
antgui
chain.bat

Then in antgui you compose a chain.bat file to be run when you
terminate. It might fire up ant, or it may have nothing it in, if the
GUI failed.

 

[asanka]

Thank You!

 

[enrique]

Wow, what an innovative idea. I'm glad someone is putting a front end
to Ant.

 

[Roedy Green]

Wow, what an innovative idea. I'm glad someone is putting a front end
to Ant.

the hardest thing about ant is navigating the docs and finding the
important stuff in amongst all the exotica.

 

[enrique]

Are you doing this for fun? Because I believe JBuilder, Eclipse and
other tools pretty much support Ant scripts...