Using JavaScript to make Apache Ant less painful

 I feel a bit guilty saying bad things about Apache Ant. It's free, it's available everywhere, and a lot of volunteers have put a lot of work into making it what it is. You can very quickly and easily make a build file for simple Java projects. But. It seems to have been more accreted than designed, and if you try to use the core system to accomplish anything outside the most basic stuff you can look forward to hours staring alternately at those horribly illegible XML files and that huge and frustratingly disorganized online manual. So I was pleasantly surprised recently to realize that you can use JavaScript directly inside your build.xml files to avoid having to fight with Ant's enormous but haphazard collection of concepts and tags. It could well be that I am the last person in the world to learn this and that everyone else has been using JavaScript to work around Ant's deficiencies since 2001. Perhaps not, though, because it used to be the case that if you wanted to use a scripting language with Ant then you needed to go off and get the relevant jars and put them where Ant could find them. What's changed is that you can now pretty much assume that you will have at least JDK 6 everywhere (it came out in December 2006), which means you automatically have a JavaScript engine. If Ant is...

Date: September, 20 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/emcmanus/archive/2010/09/20/using-javascript-make-apache-ant-less-painful

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