WOProject
WOProject
A suite of extensions for ant to build WOApplications and WOFrameworks
Please see the link to the old site above until the core documentation is moved to this new wiki.
Introduction
Ant build files are broken into what are called 'targets', similar to a Makefile. These targets are a group of, what are called, 'tasks'. Tasks are used for getting work done; they make something happend directly, e.g. move files on the filesystem, compile java source files into classes, transfer files from one server to another over ssh, etc.
While Ant is distributed with around fifty built-in tasks, any number of customized tasks can easily be added by developers outside of the core Ant team.
WOProject is such a project. WOProject adds a half dozen tasks to Ant. These tasks allow WebObject developers the freedom to use Ant in their build process, instead of the using Apple's XCode suite. A few of these tasks are: WOCompile, WOApplication, WOFramework. After installing WOProject, these tasks can be used directly in the typical Ant build.xml file in building your WebObjects projects.
See the link above to the old site for in-depth documentation on each of these new tasks, as well as their APIs.
Reasons for using Ant to build WebObjects frameworks and applications:
- Ant if highly configurable and flexible, with constant additions from the open source community, and is considered a defacto standard by the Java community
- Builds of projects with a very large number of files without dependency failures
- Allows easy automation of daily builds for team of developers, i.e. nightly builds for smoke testing, etc.