Re: [platform-ant-dev] Ant integration in Eclipse

[Jared Burns <jared-eclipse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Paul, see my comments inserted below.

On Monday 21 October 2002 04:13 pm, Paul Austin wrote:
> 1. Running ant in a mutlithreaded way (i.e it doesn't lock up eclipse or
> you can run multiple targets at the same time), this should also support
> viewing the console output from each (see the debug/run console to see
> what I mean). This is already a feature request I submitted.

We plan to support this by integrating Ant execution into the debug/launching 
framework. When you run Ant, it will show up in the debug view with your 
other processes. Also, we're going to get rid of the Ant console and just 
direct the Ant output to the debug console. You'll then be able to view the 
output from individual Ant runs by selecting the them in the debug view.
 
> 2. In the external tools menu can it be split into sub menus by project.
> Actually a nice thing to do here would be to have sub menus for each
> project under this button, then a sub menu for each ant file and then a
> menu item for each task. At the top level (for each project) you could
> still define a run task that runs multiple targets.

I think Roscoe's Ant View (<http://sourceforge.net/projects/r2tech-eclipse/>) 
mostly addresses this. It displays the Ant scripts in the workspace in a tree 
view and allows you to expand them and run targets.

> 3. For the XML editor, there are so many of these out there at the moment,
> what I would like is to have one xml editor that does code completion and
> the ant stuff could just use one of these to save development effort.

I agree and I've already contacted Bob Foster (XMLBuddy) and Alf Schiefelbein 
(Planty) about possible contributions. Hopefully, one or both of them can 
submit enough code to provide us with a relatively lightweight XML editor for 
Ant.

> 4. Integration between the ant javac output and the java editor (i.e.
> click on the problem to jump to the cause).

This is on our to-do list as well.
 
> 5. Use of ant instead of the built in build project.

We already support this as an option. Are you suggesting that all building in 
Eclipse be done with Ant?

> 6. An easier way to upgrade to a new version of ant, I still haven't
> worked out how to upgrade to 1.5, maybe even support for multiple ant
> versions.

We recently upgraded the version of Ant that we ship with Eclipse to 1.5.1. My 
understanding is that this should be backwards compatible with scripts 
written to previous versions of Ant. Is there any reason to provide explicit 
support for older versions?

Thanks,
- Jared