On Windows, we use InstallShield to initially drive the installation,
call out to other Windows installers (e.g., JDK, Apache, MySQL, WinCVS,
etc.), update the registry as needed, and finally kick off our master
Ant script to do the bulk of the installation (e.g.,
extracting/decrypting/copying/moving files, regex replacements, CRLF
fixes, calling other Ant-based installs, running JUnit/HttpUnit,
processing XML docs with XSLT, creating/updating properties files,
creating and populating databases, building and deploying J2EE apps,
etc.). There are actually one or two places that we have Ant call Java
code to create/update some Windows environment variables via JNI, but
it's fairly simple and well-contained.
On Linux, we use Ant to do it all because there's no need for registry
manipulation. We have Ant ask the user for input up front (e.g., where
to install, DNS setup, user ID/password, etc.) then do all the rest
without further user interaction.
Eric
Chappell, Simon P wrote:
Exactly. I really don't want ant to be the installer, but I do want it to help in the install process.
Setting persistent environment variables on windows boxen would be very useful for me.
Simon
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Burton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 2:05 PM
To: Ant Users List
Subject: Re: Ant Featured in Out-of-the-Box
Hello,
Chappell, Simon P wrote:
Now how excellent can you get!? :-)
I have been considering using ant for some installs, but had
wondered if it would really be suitable, now I'll look again
at the matter.
Question (which may be answered on your site, but I haven't
read it all yet) how do you manage to ensure that you have a
JRE/SDK available for ant when running from a CD-ROM and how
do you set Windows environment variables so that they will
persist across sessions?
That's why Ant on it's own may not be a suitable tool
depending on your
requirements. However, I used Ant in a project that used a commercial
installer for the GUI and JVM avalibility, etc. and then at
the end, it
handed off to Ant to configure or update the installation in
various ways:
* Upgrade an older product to a new one.
* Update .properties files.
* Fix newlines on text files.
* Fix permissions on files.
* Initialize a database schema and data.
Using Ant for those tasks really made the project much easier to work
with and more maintainable.
-Bill
Simon
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Simon P. Chappell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Java Programming Specialist www.landsend.com
Lands' End, Inc. (608) 935-4526
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Weidner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 6:43 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Ant Featured in Out-of-the-Box
FYI, Ant is featured in Out-of-the-Box 1.0, a distribution of Open
Source projects.
We wrote over 23,000 lines of Ant scripts to automatically install,
configure, and integrate over 50 Open Source projects,
including most of
the Jakarta projects, on both Linux and Windows and we'd just like to
say that Ant rocks!
Free Community Edition for Linux documentation containing detailed
step-by-step installation and configuration instructions for
most of the
Open Source projects we integrated can be found here:
http://www.ejbsolutions.com/products/obox/community/pt02.html
Everything you see in the documentation, and much more, is automated
using Ant with a little BSF/BeanShell in the few places
where we needed
full Java power. Quite simply, this project would not have been
possible without Ant.
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