Ant: Use optional dependencies in JavaDoc

If you create your Javadocs you sometimes get unresolved reference warnings: package xy does not exist or cannot find symbol
If you define the path with these dependencies outside of the target you could reference that path using the classpathref attribute.
But if the path definition is done in an other target and you don’t want to [...]

Let Ant tasks choose the attribute values by themself

For a long time an idea travelled in my head. But now it arrived.
In my several Ant build files I have constructs like
<javac source=”${javac.source}” debug=”${javac.debug}” target=”${javac.target}” …
and the according properties defined in an external file. Now have a compile run for the source code and the test code and you have doubled this amount of [...]

I found an overview article …

On JavaWorld John Ferguson Smart wrote a nice article about some of the most interesting Java evolutions in 2008. He discovers tools for Build automatisation (Hudson, Bamboo, Maven, Ant, Grant, Gradle, Subversion), Testing tools (JBehave, easyb, Selenium, WebTest) and IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans). Conclusion: a very nice read.

Ant + JavaFront: start Ant tasks from the command line (2)

In my last blog I wrote about a new AntLib in Ants sandbox: javafront with which you have the ability to start tasks directly from the command line – without any buildfile. With that I was able to do the pom2ivy conversion Torsten Curdt asked for:
task.bat -lib path-to-ivy.jar -xmlns:jar antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant ivy:convertpom pomFile my.pom ivyFile ivy.xml

Ant + JavaFront: start Ant tasks from the command line

Reading the blog Converting maven pom to ivy I asked myself, why it should not be possible to start Ant tasks from the command line.
Stefan on the other side was bored always to here that Ant relies on XML and he presented a way for writing Buildfiles in plain (annotated) Java using JavaFront, a library [...]

Ant: catching all marked lines in text files for creating a changes document

MartianSoftware has released (a long time ago) two Ant task: <snip> and <rundoc>. While I am not sure about the benefits of <rundoc> (as I dont know docbook really well) <snip> seems to be a nice task. Extracting parts of a file with Ant on board utilities is not that easy.
Using the snip task extracting [...]

Links for 2008-10-16

According to this German article (relies on an article by ComputerWorld Australia)Australia plans to filter all internet traffic in AUS. There are two blacklists: one for illegal content (which should be blocked) and one for content for adults.
Trustin Lee has released Ant2IDE. Basically this is a BuildListener that collects (almost) all data required for generating [...]

Ant: Deleting files from ZIP

A common problem is deleting single files from a ZIP. An old workaround is „unzip+zip“. This snippet implements a macro. The <selectors/> statement in line 21 together with the <element> definition in line 14 is the placeholder for all selectors you pass in.

<project default="test">

    <target name="prepare">
        <mkdir dir="zip"/>
        <echo file="zip/one.txt"   message="one"/>
        <echo file="zip/two.txt"   message="two"/>
        <echo [...]

GUI-Output from Apache ant

This is the first of my Ant snippets. I think I will post more in the future. Most of these snippets are written during discussions on the dev@ant and user@ant mailing lists for showing possibilities or solutions to problems. Sometimes I only played with something …
With <echo> you can print log messages to Ant’s output. [...]

Google Summer of Code 2008

Cool – some years ago I got the idea that refactoring support for Ant buildfiles would be nice and opened a feature request on Eclipse. Now (three years later) this (maybe) could be done in a GSoC project because now it is proposed by the Eclipse team.