Description Rodrigo Peretti 2002-09-12 17:26:42 EDT

I've seen a few posts on the newsgroup about people asking for some of the 
components to generate Ant scripts for them (specially JDT). For example if 
you have Java Projects (not plug-ins) and want to make nightly builds of them 
you might want to write Ant buildfiles for that. If Eclipse already has 
everything configured (project build path, etc...) wouldn't it be good to have 
an option for Eclipse to generate the Ant buildfile for you? This is only one 
example.

Another example is PDE Build. When you right click on a plug-in and 
choose "Create Plug-in JARs", PDE generates a build.xml file used to build the 
plug-in.

What about JUnit tests? Wouldn't be nice if you could generate Ant scripts to 
run JUnit on all the test suites in a project?

If many of the Eclipse plug-ins start to provide Ant script generation for 
some of their functionality, a common (and extensible) API for generating the 
scripts would be more than welcome.

What about an Ant editor? Couldn't it make use of an API like that?

I'm not sure if there is technology out there (maybe from Jakarta?) that 
provides API for generating Ant scripts but it could be worth investigating. 
The PDE Build component has a very basic support for that but it is not 
extensible and there might be better approaches than the one used there.