Professional Java Tools for Extreme Programming: Ant, XDoclet, JUnit, Cactus, and Maven (Programmer to Programmer)

Now, to put all this information together, we will programmatically create a project, give it a single target and task, and call execute() on it. Using our task GreetJon from the description of the Task class, we will build a task that can be executed using its own Main() method.

The project file is as follows :

import org.apache.tools.ant.*; public class ChapterAntProject extends org.apache.tools.ant.Project{ public ChapterAntProject(){ super.init(); } public static void main(String[] args){ try{ /* Create the Project object and add the custom Tag */ Project proj = new ChapterAntProject(); proj.setName("jonsProject"); GreetJon task = new GreetJon(); proj.addTaskDefinition("jonsTask", task.getClass()); /* Create the Target Object as a child of the project and add the Task to it */ Target targ = new Target(); targ.setName("jonsTarget"); targ.addTask(task); proj.addTarget("jonsTarget",targ); proj.setDefaultTarget("jonsTarget"); /* Execute the Target */ proj.executeTarget("jonsTarget"); } catch(Exception e){ e.printStackTrace(); throw new BuildException("An error occurred while building and running your custom task",e); } } }

The task file is as follows:

import org.apache.tools.ant.*; public class GreetJon extends Task { public GreetJon(){ ;} public void execute() throws BuildException{ System.out.println("Hello Zach!"); } }

Running the project from a Java environment will produce output equivalent to the following Ant build.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <project name="jonsProject" basedir = "." default = "jonsTarget"> <target name="jonsTarget"> <taskdef name="jonsTask" classname="GreetJon"/> </target> </project>

This example is meant to be a simplified launching point from which you can build many custom tasks , projects, and targets to perform specific actions within the Ant framework.