Ant, in use.

Since I’ve made the switch to an FDT powered Eclipse as my primary editor I explored the potential use of Ant (another neato tool) to assist in the development of the projects I work on. I read the Ant definitive guide and found that its pretty simple to set up.

There’s a few tasks in specific I was looking for. I’ll be looking into sync, ideally it will look at the differences between local and remote directories, but I’ll have to hunt down some more

• Create local backups.

  You can automate the creation of backups; tar.gz’s or zips, through ant. Here’s a block of code to take a look at

  		target name="backup_local" depends="init" description="backup the current state of the local site"
  			tar tarfile="${tarball.tar}" 
  			     basedir="${basedir}" 
  			     includes="**"
  			     excludes="archives/**, resources/**, .*, **.settings*, build.xml" /
  			gzip zipfile="${tarball.tar.gz}" src="${tarball.tar}" /
  			delete file="${tarball.tar}"/
  		/target
  

  
  

  I setup a bunch of properties to allow some of these setting to be tweaked at the top of the build file. There are a bunch of excludes that I use to stop some of the files from being backed up.

• Deployment on a live ftp server.

  You’ll need to get ftp to work with ant in eclipse first. It will require commons-net.jar and Jakarta ORO JAR file java objects. first before you use the following kind of snippet.

  	target name="deploy"
  		echo message="deployLocalDir : ${deployLocalDir}"/
  		echo message="deployServer : ${deployServer}"/
  		echo message="deployUserId : ${deployUserId}"/
  		echo message="deployRemoteDir : ${deployRemoteDir}"/
  		
  		
  		mkdir dir="${deployLocalDir}"/
  		  ftp action="mkdir"
  	 		   server="${deployServer}"
  		       userid="${deployUserId}"
  		       password="${deployPwd}"
  	       remotedir="${deployRemoteDir}"/
  
  		 ftp server="${deployServer}"
  		       remotedir="${deployRemoteDir}"
  		       userid="${deployUserId}"
  		       password="${deployPwd}"
  		       depends="yes"
  		       binary="no"
  		       separator="${remoteSeperator}"
  		       verbose="yes"
  		    fileset dir="${deployLocalDir}"
  		      include name="**"/
  		      exclude name="**/.svn"/
  	   	      exclude name="**/CVS/**"/
  		    /fileset
  		  /ftp
  	/target
  

  
  

  I’ll have to check to make sure it removes the .svn and cvs files in addition to .DS_Store files, if they exist.

• Compile swfs through fdt.

  You’ll need to use an ant target like:

      target name="compile" depends="init" description="--> compiles all the main swfs needed"
          fdt.flashCompile file="${localSourceDir}/${projectName}/index.fla" timeout="1000"/
      /target
  

  
  

  Dont forget to set the eclipse IDE to use the same JRE. (from fdt)

  1. Run -> External Tools -> External Tools … 2. Select your Ant Build 3. Select the Tab “JRE” 4. Switch from “Seperate JRE” to “Run in the same JRE as the workspace”