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Ant2IDE - IDE project file generation from Ant build.xml

Posted on 2008-11-18 20:07:10.0 by Trustin Lee [ View original post ]

Ant2IDE generates Eclipse (or other IDE-specific) project files with proper classpath and source folder settings from Ant build.xml automatically.

I wrote ant2eclipse long time ago with my crude shell script skill to generate Eclipse project files from an Ant build.xml file.

In Ant2IDE, I extended the idea so that it works in a more elegant way using the BuildListener interface. The usage is pretty simple:

Add ant2ide.jar to the classpath:

export CLASSPATH="/usr/local/libexec/ant2ide.jar:$CLASSPATH"

Change the working directory to the project home:
```
cd /home/trustin/workspace/myAntProject
```
Clean the build
```
ant clean
```

Run ant with the -listener option and appropriate task(s):

ant -listener net.gleamynode.ant2ide.EclipseProjectGenerator compiile-main compile-test

You might prefer to use the following simple shell script:

#!/bin/sh
# Path: /usr/local/bin/ant2eclipse
export CLASSPATH="$CLASSPATH:/usr/local/libexec/ant2ide/ant2ide.jar"
ant -listener net.gleamynode.ant2ide.EclipseProjectGenerator "$@"

How it works

How does Ant2IDE generate the Eclipse project files? It listens to the build events fired by Ant and records the source and destination directory of the javac tasks into its internal data structure. Once build is completed successfully, Ant2IDE processes the recorded information to generate IDE-specific project files. It’s very simple but it works much better than analyzing build.xml directly or creating a new Java project from an Eclipse workbench.

Caveats

Of course, Ant2IDE is not a silver bullet – there’s some limitation in this approach.

First, you can’t get the correct build information unless you provide a proper Ant target. For example, clean target will never help AntIDE generate the project files. You should specify the target that compiles all source code, such as build-all or all, test-all.

Second, it doesn’t add all resource directories automatically. You have to add them manually for most cases. There’s no way to determine exactly whether a copy task copies resource files for now. One exception is when your project has a directory layout which is similar to that of Maven 2 project; Ant2IDE looks for a resources directory when the name of the source code directory is java, and add the resources directory to the source path automatically.

Third, Eclipse JDT is the only IDE that Ant2IDE supports at this moment. It’s designed to support other IDEs such as NetBeans and IntelliJ, but I don’t use them these days. Any contribution would be great.