Ant Book Approacheth [Was PreservingFileWriter]

Erik Hatcher erik at hatcher.net
Tue Jun 11 11:50:05 PDT 2002


Thanks, Terrence, for CC'ing this to me.  A few inline comments:

From: "Terence Parr" <parrt at jguru.com>
To: <antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 2:13 PM
Subject: Re: Ant Book Approacheth [Was PreservingFileWriter]


> On Tuesday, June 11, 2002, at 06:19  AM, Bogdan Mitu wrote:
> > Just incidentally, the next incarnation of Ant (Ant 2) will be
> > independent
> > of XML or other particular encoding, which I think it's a step in the
> > right
> > direction.

Ant 1.5 actually has pluggable ProjectHelper capability to allow you to plug
in a class that constructs the Project object.  The default one builds it
from parsing an XML file, but you can now plug in your own.  Maybe you ANTLR
gurus could have one that takes a Makefile and constructs a Project object
:))

This pluggable layer will be used, I think, to start providing XML namespace
support, but is much more generally capable than that.  One person I've seen
report that he's taken a project model (in XML) and XSLT'd it to a build
file on the fly when invoking Ant so that all he maintains are the project
model and XSLT, no build.xml.

> For your info, Erik Hatcher, a cool cat that manages the Ant FAQ at
> jGuru, is done with his Ant book.  Should be out soon:
>
> Java Development with Ant by Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran
> ISBN 1930110-588 -- will be published August 1st
> Softbound, 450 pages, $44.95

And this is really going to be about 600+ pages - Manning has just never
updated their info on our latest page count!  And yes, my fingers are tired.

    Erik



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