Re: New Ant GUI - 'Ant's Nest'

[Chris Clohosy]

Thank you Rich, Erik, and Dominique for your comments, I'll certainly look 
into them. When I first started looking into this around May-time, I could 
not find any easy way of extracting the information needed from the Ant 
class files. I tried everything, from reflection to the Ant API itself and 
could not find anything. The best I could do was to look for the bean 
conventions like getters and setters but I didn't want to rely on that. Alos 
there was no way of knowing if an attribute was required, or if it became 
required if another attribute was set, etc. That's way I was heading down 
the meta-data route with annotations, I didn't have a clue they were already 
marked up with @tags!

This is a university project, and at the moment time is running out so I 
have to prioritise what has to be included in the final version, so bear 
with me :-p But you all have definetely shed some light on what lies behind 
Ant, and I'm very grateful.

Chris
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Erik Hatcher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ant Users List" <user@ant.apache.org>
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 12:25 AM
Subject: Re: New Ant GUI - 'Ant's Nest'


And further, Ant itself was annotated with XDoclet @tags a few years ago 
for auto-generation of documentation and with the plan to use it for 
metadata generation for tools to use.  As far as I know, no tool vendor as 
picked up on this metadata sadly.  I'm not sure how the 
IntrospectionHelper improvements and the XDoclet tags (which probably have 
not been kept up-to-date) synergize - though I suspect there is 
information returned from introspection that would still make some Ant 
tasks fail that do programmatic validation checks of data.  The @tags can 
provide that additional information, such that only one of a set of 
attributes may be used.

Erik
On Jan 6, 2005, at 6:04 PM, Dominique Devienne wrote:
From: Rich Wagner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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.
Actually, instead of duplicating the reflection code in Ant, use the Ant
API itself. We have recently improved IntrospectionHelper to expose all
attributes and elements and extension points (add(X) methods) supported
by any bean (task/type/etc...), including whether it accepts nested
text.
Now with AntLibs, you can also auto-discover tasks/types by scanning the
classpath for antlib.xml resources, which is the most often used way to
declare an AntLib such that is works with the antlib:package.name magic
namespace URIs (it then expect a package/name/antlib.xml resource).
From the antlib.xml resources, you can know which classes to load and
feed to IntrospectionHelper to find out everything about them in terms
of attributes/elements/extensions-points/text supported.
Just my 2 cents. --DD
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