Know the feeling when you’re just about to release code to the public’s eye, and all you need to do is write that pesky build file? Even as I write it I feel it’s an understatement: the task of creating an ant build file can take a few good days out of anyone’s life, and even with copying the last project’s build file and changing a few parameters you can’t really minimise it to less than half a day’s work.
But why should you, really? If you’re working with Eclipse you probably notice how your IDE knows about the relationships between all the projects in the workspace, which project requires which Jar files, and where to place all the binaries. After all, it is your workspace and integrated development environment. So why can’t that information be used to generate that damned file?
Well, one guy thought it should be, and implemented something better: a generic build system for Eclipse-managed projects called ebuild. In his blog Omry describes ebuild himself, but since his posts are in Hebrew I’ve decided to spread the word in English as well.
Ebuild is added to your workspace and, by adding a short file called build.properties, can be executed in order to build your project. After that, you get one build.xml file which can build any of your projects. All your projects need to have is the build.properties file in it, worth three lines of key-value pairs at most, and ebuild will do the magic of finding out the project’s dependencies and build order.
Omry is also the person behind JNotify, the library which brings you file system notifications in a nicely wrapped Java API.
For those of you who use IntelliJ: as far as I know, selecting “Generate Ant File” from the “Build” menu should be more than enough for you - it doesn’t create the magical build.xml file, but it does save a lot of work when lazying out on writing the build files.
July 19th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Aviad,
You slightly misunderstood:
it’s not a build file generator - it’s a build file that can build (almost) any Eclipse Java project.
July 19th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Just to show you how Java is more a native language for me than even Hebrew.
I will soon correct the post and add a short explanation on how to use ebuild.
July 19th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Done. Omry’s comment might seem silly now that the post is changed.. But the title is still there (don’t really want to change it.)
Just know that at some point in time, I made a mistake and wrote that ebuild was a build file generator while its actually a generic build system. That’s all.