What is Ant-Contrib Tasks?

The Ant-Contrib project provides a collection of tasks and types that extend Ant to work as a scripting language as well as a build tool.

Many developers want more from Ant than the ability to define dependencies. Ant-Contrib adds extra functionality to let Ant act more like a programming lanuage. Most tasks require Ant 1.5 or higher to work properly.

“Ant-Contrib Tasks” is an “independent third party” library of useful additional procedural and utility ApacheAnt Tasks.

 

Pre-Requisite:

First you must install Apache Ant itself, most of the Ant-Contrib tasks require Ant 1.5 or higher to work properly. You can download Ant from Apache.

Download Link: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36177

“Ant-Contrib Tasks” is also TWO independent ant task libraries:

• “cpptasks for Apache Ant” – “The cc task can compile various source languages and produce executables, shared libraries (aka DLL’s) and static libraries. Compiler adaptors are currently available for C/C++, FORTRAN, MIDL and Windows Resource compilers.”
  • Project home page: http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/cpptasks/index.html
• ‘Ant-Contrib Other Tasks’
  • Documentation of ant tasks: http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/tasks/tasks/index.html
  • Download: Must fetch from Subversion and build yourself. See instructions at: https://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=36177

Installation

See the cc tasks for installation instructions for cpptasks. To install ant-contrib:

1. Copy ant-contrib-0.3.jar to the lib directory of your Ant installation. If you want to use one of the tasks in your own project, add the lines

2.  <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties"/>

to your build file.

1. Keep ant-contrib-0.3.jar in a separate location. You now have to tell Ant explicitly where to find it (say in /usr/share/java/lib):

4.  <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties">

5.    <classpath>

6.      <pathelement location="/usr/share/java/lib/ant-contrib-0.3.jar"/>

7.    </classpath>

8.  </taskdef>

Manual and weblinks:

http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/ant-contrib/manual/tasks/index.html

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ant-contrib

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36177