Chapter 6: Ant Tool Support

Many development tools, text editors, Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), and other Java development environments support Ant. You can add Ant to several existing development tools, such as Ant Farm for jEdit, Eclipse, AntRunner for JBuilder, CruiseControl, and Intellij IDEA.

This chapter explains the tools that support Ant. It also describes how to configure and run the tools.

Ant Farm for jEdit

jEdit is a text editor written in Java for developing Java source code. jEdit is freeware available at http://www.jedit.org/.

jEdit provides Plugin Manager under Plugins menu option that allows you to add custom-built features to the tool.

Configuring Ant Farm for jEdit

You can install Ant Farm using Plugin Manager from jEdit. To install Ant Farm for jEdit:

Select the Plugin Manager menu.
Select Install Plugins->Ant Farm.
Select Install->Ant Farm. This downloads and installs Ant Farm with the required plug ins on the Plugins menu of jEdit.

The Plugin Manager window appears, as shown in Figure 6-1:

Click To expand: This figure shows the available plug ins for jEdit. You can install the Ant Farm plug in from the list.

Figure 6-1: The Plugin Manager Window

When the installation process is complete, you need to configure Ant Farm. To configure the tool:

Expand the Plugin Options menu.
Select Ant Farm from the Plugins menu. The Ant Farm window appears, as shown in Figure 6-2:

Figure 6-2: The Ant Farm Window

The buildfiles are in the form of a tree. The top of each tree is a buildfile. When you expand the tree, it lists the executable targets of the buildfile. You can execute the listed targets by clicking the Run Current Target button.

The Options drop-down menu contains four items: Prompt for properties, Hide subtargets, Save all before build, and Logging level.

Running Ant Farm

You need to select the buildfile to run Ant Farm. Selecting the icon for the buildfile automatically executes the buildfile. When you execute the buildfile, the Console window displays the build output, as shown in Figure 6-3:

Click To expand: This figure shows the Console window displaying the build output and the various targets of the build. The BUILD SUCCESSFUL message indicates that the build is successful.

Figure 6-3: The Console Window

You can edit and create the buildfile using Ant Farm. When you edit and save a buildfile in jEdit, the Ant Farm window automatically updates the list of available targets for that buildfile. You need to right-click the buildfile tree and select the Edit build file option from the drop-down list. Ant Farm shows the buildfile, as shown in Figure 6-4:

Click To expand: This figure shows the contents of the build.xml file. The <description> tag describes the project. The <property> tag defines the properties of the build.

Figure 6-4: The Buildfile