Chris,
I saw this text on the "Ant's Nest" web site:
Yet there exists very few GUI's to help create Ant build files and it is Ant's Nest's aim to change this. The main way it will do this is through an intuitive drag 'n' drop interface, with support on how to assemble valid tasks and targets. This will be done by using the 'Ant Meta-Model', a collection of files that describe features of Ant, e.g. how tasks are made up and which features are deprecated.
Have you considered using reflection, in addition to meta-model files? In other words, imagine searching Ant's classpath for task classes, and then using reflection to (for instance) discover what attributes each task class accepts.
I realize this might not be able to give you all of the information your GUI might need, such as help text for each task that describes what how the task works. But the advantage of using reflection is that your GUI might then support custom/extension tasks. That is, if as a developer, I wrote my own task classes and added them to Ant's classpath, then the proposed technique could find my additional task classes and your GUI could potentially then help to create instances of my custom tasks in buildfiles...
Just a thought...
-- Rich Wagner
P.S. Speaking of per-task help... If your GUI doesn't already, it might be nice for it to provide a help feature that -- given a task name -- launches a browser and displays the Ant documentation for the selected task. Or instead of launching a browser, your GUI might include a simple, embedded HTML viewer, e.g. I believe even the standard javax.swing.JTextArea class supports the display of simple HTML...
Chris Clohosy wrote:
Hi all,
I would like to draw your attention to an open-source Ant GUI that I am developing, called 'Ant's Nest'. I'm keen for your feedback and bug reports on it, as it's being made especially for you guys! As you will see it's largely based around a drag 'n' drop interface and an XML model of Ant tasks. It can be downloaded from http://antsnest.sourceforge.net and any problems you find please send to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Another feature of the program is that developers can write their own plugins, allowing in the future for maybe an easier way of creating an Ant build file? Anyway download it and let me know what you think :-p
Best Wishes,
Chris
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