I've played around with this, and it seems to be pretty good. A very useful idea.
Of course, when you put something out like this, you gotta be ready for the feedback :^) 1. As you indicated, it's 'thin' right now. It would be nice if it supported all the normal options, such as "-buildfile" and "-emacs", to name a couple. 2. Since the potential is for more than just building (I'm looking at it as a command line interface that is platform independent) it would be nice if messages like "BUILD SUCCESSFUL" were suppressed, since it's not really a build anymore... "ZACHCIAL,SLAWOMIR (HP-France,ex1)" wrote: > > Hi, > > Last night I thought I would be great to avoid to start JVM and to parse > the > Ant build file each time I want to do a build. I know that there is an > ongoing effort called 'antidote' but I was thinking rather about a command > line tool. > > And that's how Ant Shell (antsh) is born :-) > > Ant Shell is a command line tool with build targets as the shell commands. > It has also (at the moment) 2+1 additional commands: exit, and help - which > does the same as Ant run with '-projecthelp' option. When you just hit > "enter" the last used target(s) (shown in square brackets in antsh prompt) > will be used (that's where the trick is :-). If the commands are targets > you > may run several at the same time (just like with Ant) - they are > space-separated (just like with Ant :-). > > Its main purpose is not to be a full-featured shell (like bash for example) > but rather to offer some basic functionalities and especially to avoid to > start JVM and parse build file each time. > > Implementation: > The current implementation is far from being the state of the art - it's > much more a prototype and a proof of concept. I just took the Ant's "Main" > class, renamed it and changed it slightly. I had also to leave it in > "org.apache.tools.ant" package as it uses some protected methods (ex. > Project.fireXXX). > > I would like to know your thoughts about it. Please try it (attached to > this > message) and tell me if the tool like this makes sense, and if yes, what > are > the other features that would be useful. I might become the Ant's > interactive mode (ex. ant -interactive). > > If you think antsh is useful I'd love to do a clean implementation and add > all the demanded features. > > It was done with Ant 1.2, JDK 1.3, Win2000. I haven't test it - just built > a > couple of targets. To install it unzip the file in the ANT_HOME directory. > If you want to look at the source code - it's in antsh.jar. > You use it exactly the same way as Ant - the command name is "antsh" > instead > of "ant". > > There is also a screenshot :-) - "antsh[_last_targets_]> " is the antsh > prompt. > > Best Regards, > Slawek Zachcial > > (See attached file: antsh.zip) > (See attached file: antsh-screenshot.gif) > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Name: antsh.zip > antsh.zip Type: application/zip > Encoding: base64 > > Name: antsh-screenshot.gif > antsh-screenshot.gif Type: GIF Image (image/gif) > Encoding: base64
