ant4eclipse

If you're a developer using Eclipse IDE, you know how streamlined it is for coding, compiling, versioning and deploying applications. However, setting up a continuous build system with Ant outside of Eclipse can be tricky since Ant lacks the ability to use any of Eclipse's configurations such as classpathes, launcher, or team project sets. This often leads to the need for reconfiguring every time a developer makes changes in Eclipse. That's where ant4eclipse comes into play.

The ant4eclipse project provides a set of Ant tasks that can be used to integrate Eclipse configurations into Ant buildscripts. Its aim is to reduce the redundancy of Eclipse and Ant configurations, making it easier to keep your Eclipse and Ant configurations in sync. With ant4eclipse, you can set up classpathes, checkout complete workspaces, and run Java applications as configured in an Eclipse Launch Configuration.

With these tasks, you can create a complete automatic build system that starts by checking out all required projects from CVS, builds all projects in the correct order with classpath settings as specified in Eclipse, and launches your applications as they are specified in Eclipse. If you or someone else changes a configuration in Eclipse, those changes are immediately visible to your buildfiles without changing a single line of code.

Requirements for ant4eclipse include JDK 1.4 and JDK5, and it's built and tested against Ant 1.6. The use of Ant contrib tasks is recommended to fully utilize the power of ant4eclipse. This latest release includes support for Subversion and several bug fixes. Overall, ant4eclipse is a powerful tool for developers looking to streamline their build processes and reduce redundancy in their projects.