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An internal build.xml editor with the following features would be very handy: * graphical representation of targets * target dependency tree * graphical task editor which knows which attributes a task supports, as well as sub-tasks it can contain, performing validation at this level already
I would appreciate having a editing facility for build.xml files. I ordered the features by the importance to me ;-) 1) A build-in xml editor to maintain the build.xml file. (I read that there is something like that for developing plug-ins?!) 2) An outline available of the tasks. 3) A hierarchical view/outline sorted by a) the structure of the xml-file and b) the dependencies. 4) A context menu in the the outline for creating new ant tasks depending on the selected task, or making the selected task depend on the new task, e.g. I right click on "compile" and create "deploy", which will depend on "compile". 5) Add a wizard for the "create" action from 4), which prompts not only for the name but also for the task using the available tasks from ant. 6)The wizard from 5) knows also about the attributes of the tasks. 7) In the outline/view (see 4) and 5)) you can drag and drop task dependencies, e.g. move "compile_dynamic_content" before "compile_java". 8) The build process in eclipse should be "tweakable" like in ant and by ant file. Like mentioned above it would be nice to define more than one target for compilation with more than one task "compile" with different classpathes and probably different compilers.
Not included in 2.0 plan. Defer.
Reopening for consideration.
*** Bug 13896 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I strongly think that this suggestion provided by Mariano Kamp is an important feature missing in Eclipse. While making comparisons with other IDE's in the market, Netbeans, IntelliJ already has them. My suggestion is that the ant editor should have both text and graphical interface. If this is too much then u can leave the graphical interface for later, but a full blown text editor is a MUST with code completion feature and code formatting feature. Well another thing that you can do is contact Bob (the guy behind XMLBuddy) and ask him if he would like to donate his source code. If he is willing to donate his code, u can work on top of his code to build the ant xml editor. Though XMLBuddy is missing an important feature like proper code formatting, u can fix them. The feature list that Mariano pointed out for the ant editor should all be included. Once u have the ant xml editor ready, u can integrate Antview (which u have added in M3 release)with ant text editor. By the way Antview has some major BUGS which I am going to report after testing it thoroughly. I am looking forward for an positive action to be taken against my feature request, and have it implemented as soon as possible. Saumendra
Don't bother contacting Bob Foster. He's intending to sell XMLBuddy for profit, as working on it is his main job.
Is there work going on this request that has been submitted? Well this looks like a lot of coding to be done, but it is extremely necessary cause Eclipse is supporting Ant. Having an antview doesn't make sense at all if there isn't an editor to code the ant build script. Moreover including antview makes Eclipse look like it is only providing and supporting 30% of Ant. Netbeans has a GUI based, and text editor for Ant. IntelliJ IDEA has an extremly good text editor for Ant with code completion, validation, code formatting, syntax highlighting. Why is Eclipse behind regarding this feature, please consider this request and provide as atleast a full fledge text editor for ANT !!!!!!!
Saumendra, I think there has already been some discussion of including Planty with the Eclipse Ant support (what's the status of that anyway?), which would provide syntax highlighting, outline view, and code completion. You should get on the Eclipse Ant mailing list to see what is going on. Certainly less yelling would be helpful. :-)
We've been in contact with the author of Planty on the platform-ant-dev mailing list and he's said that he plans to contribute his editor to Eclipse. The UI-Text folk have also been doing some work on an XML editing framework that could be extended for Ant. We're currently in a "wait and see" mode.
Planty has been submitted to Eclipse as a contribution from GEBIT in Bug 29148. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 29148 ***
