 | 07 October 2002 |
Great Ant
Finally bit the bullet and started using the build tool Ant. There's only so much you can do with DOS batch files. Can't think why I've waited so long to try Ant when from a developer perspective it is essentially a *productivity* tool - my favorite kind :-) Still getting used to the syntax and haven't quite mastered the javadoc task yet but I'm pretty sure this will change my Java development work forever. It will be particularly well suited to webservice creation work where there's a whole lotta file deploying going on. I've managed to use it to automate building PDFs with FOP. Also nice the ability to automatically send mails when various tasks have been completed. My only niggle with Ant so far (really a Windows ME problem) is that I haven't been able to launch it successfully from my editor of choice Textpad. I had to bump up the environment space to get the ant launcher batch files to run at all from the command line but Textpad doesn't seem to be picking up these values. For the time being I can redirect the output to a file and just reload the file but it would be nice if I could get this working from Textpad.
Another thing not so great on Windows ME - McAffee Personal Firewall which I've been trialing, made my system unstable with crashes on shutdown, or when it shutdown successfully, freezes on startup, not good, so into the cyber bin with you sonny jim. I still wonder about moving to XP, or shall I just wait until I buy my next hardware...Hmn.
1:40:23 AM
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