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by Joey Gibson.
Original Post: Free Eclipse Classpath Ant Task
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I've just released version 1.0 of a freeAnt
custom task to make it a little easier to work on a project using
both Ant and Eclipse. What this
task does is read the .classpath file that Eclipse uses to
maintain your project's classpath, combines that with your Eclipse
preferences to expand classpath variables and then creates a path-like
structure in your Ant project that you can compile against.
I wrote this because I use Eclipse and I always also have a
build file. Keeping the two in sync, classpath-wise, was always a
hassle. Now I can simply update the classpath inside Eclipse, and
whenever I do an Ant build it will automatically be in sync.
I wrote it against Eclipse 3.0 M8 originally. Then I upgraded to M9
and it stopped working. So with a bit of futzing about, I got it to
work with both 3.0 versions and 2.1.3, all three of which
keep the preferences file in completely different places with
completely different names. But that's taken care of now. I have also
tested on both WindowsXP and Linux, but more on XP than Linux.
To use it, drop the jar file (plus jdom.jar
if you don't already have
it) in ANT_HOME/lib. Then taskdef the task
Then call the task. There are several optional attributes, but if you
want the classpath to end up in a path called "classpath", then you
can probably get by with just this
<eclipsecp workspace="/home/me/workspace"/>
If you are on Windows, and using Eclipse 3.0 M8 or later and you keep
your workspace in C:/Eclipse/workspace then you don't even
have to do that much. You can get by with
<eclipsecp/>
Once you've executed the task, just reference the newly-created path
from your javac task or anything else that takes a path as an
argument.
I've got several downloadable versions available, in both zip and
tar.gz formats, with and without source, and with and without
jdom.jar. If you use it and like it/don't like it/have suggestions,
please let me know.
I've heard there are other tools out there that do this, but I didn't
find them, so I wrote my own. Please email me with any comments you
have about it.
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