Presents your 
JAVA E-NEWSLETTER for January 2, 2003

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GET MORE OUT OF ANT WITH THESE USEFUL SNIPPETS

Apache Jakarta's Ant software has fast become a standard for many
development projects, both open source and proprietary. Here are two 
simple tips for getting more out of your Ant scripts.

An Ant script is a command you run with a whole set of options, but
there's no obvious way to see those options without looking at the script
itself. Rather than adding a target name that outputs all the options that
may be passed to the script, give each top-level target a description and
use ant-projecthelp. The build.xml snippet would then look like this:

  <project default="run">
    <target name="compile" depends="test" description="Compile the
source code">
        ...
    </target>

    <target name="run" depends="compile" description="Run the example">
        ...
    </target>

    <target name="test">
        ...
    </target>
  </project>

The ant-projecthelp will output this:

Buildfile: build.xml
Default target:

 run      Run the example

Main targets:

 compile  Compile the source code
 run      Run the example

Subtargets:

 test


BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 2 seconds

Anything without a description is automatically considered to be a
sub-target.

A second useful snippet for Ant is the ability to use environment
variables from within your Ant script. Java has moved away from using
environment variables, but for something like an Ant script, they are still 
very useful. The Ant developers have made such variables available on common
platforms with the property task's environment attribute. It's used as follows:

  <!-- turn on environment variables -->
  <property environment="env"/>
  <property name="ant.home" value="${env.ANT_HOME}"/>

The environment attribute turns on environment variables inside the
namespace of "env", allowing any environment variable to be accessed by
prefixing "env." to the variable name.

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