>
> Peter Donald (have to use full name because this list is
> soooo full ;) , any
> hint on how to include a basic templating mechanism with current Ant?
> I recall you favor templating, and I'm sure you can help us
> (I'm interested
> too) and give us some advice.
>
Just to briefly describe how I've implemented my templates: I have a
template buildfile (regular Ant buildfile) with some common (or default)
targets, paths, properties, etc. Then for every "real" project I merge
(with XSLT) this template with another customization (also an Ant buildfile)
which overrides definitions in the template. This works like a simple
inheritance mechanism. So I could have a template like:
<project name="template" default="compile">
<property name="source-dir" value="src"/>
<property name="build-dir" value="build"/>
<target name="init"/>
<target name="compile" depends="init">
<javac srcdir="${source-dir}" destdir="${build-dir}"/>
</target>
</project>
and a customization for a project (notice the additional <super/> in target
compile):
<project name="custom">
<property name="build-dir" value="classes"/>
<target name="idlj">
<exec/>
</target>
<target name="compile" depends="init,idlj">
<super/>
</target>
</project>
which would be merged into:
<project name="custom" default="compile">
<property name="source-dir" value="src"/>
<property name="build-dir" value="classes"/>
<target name="init"/>
<target name="idlj">
<exec/>
</target>
<target name="compile" depends="init,idlj">
<javac srcdir="${source-dir}" destdir="${build-dir}"/>
</target>
</project>
I found this to work quite nicely. I added the <super> target because I
wanted as few changes as possible in the template to cause manual changes to
be made to the customization.
--
knut
