[psubedi1]

Hi,

I am wondering if there’s a way to generate a Ant build file for a MyEclipse Web Project. Our project manager wants to be able to use Ant but on a MyEclipse Web project.

I wouldn’t mind using MyEclipse IDE provided build mechanism exclusively. However, it seems my manager prefers to use Ant. But I must empower my project manager.

Help!

Thanks,

[NeutronIC]

I can definitely agree with your project manager’s request to have the application buildable outside of an IDE – there are lots of reasons for this, the biggest one is that it enables you to have an external build environment run by something like Cruise Control that just continually rebuilds and checks your code – not really possible with an IDE based system.

I’ve seen a few things on the net for exporting Eclipse configurations out to ant, and I don’t think it would be too hard to use things like the ant-classpath project (which makes the eclipse .classpath available to ant) and write your own – the MyEclipse Web project is quite simple and once you’ve got the .classpath handled there’s not much else to do.

We went the other way around – I don’t want to be dependant on one particular IDE (beneficial in this instance as MyEclipse will be our second IDE in the company, Netbeans being the ‘incumbent’) so our build system is 100% ant-based, and then I have written a series of “publishers” that publish Eclipse and Netbeans native configurations (e.g. .project, .classpath etc) so that the code can be built and run for dev/test purposes completely within the relevant IDE. It seems to work very well so far for both regular apps and webapps.

Hope this is of some use.

Matt.

[Author]

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