All,
I recently upgraded to Ant 1.5 and saw some of my code break.
No big deal that, but I'd like to
+ offer some feedback on Ant
+ make one suggestion
Ant is good, otherwise I wouldn't use it. Now for the bad part.
+ Ant is difficult to extend.
Take the Ant task for example. I have a subclass (now broken)
that allows the addition of a subclass of Property to the
Ant task. The Property subclass works just like its superclass,
but it is lazily evaluated. I won't dwell on it, but basically
I have a subclass of Ant, that would like to add a subclass of
Property to the invoked project.
In Ant 1.4, I could do this:
public LazyProperty createLazyProperty() {
if (p1 == null) {
init();
}
LazyProperty p= (LazyProperty) p1.createTask ("lazyproperty");
if (p == null) {
p1.addTaskDefinition ("lazyproperty", LazyProperty.class);
p= (LazyProperty)p1.createTask("lazyproperty");
}
p.setUserProperty (true);
properties.addElement (p);
return p;
}
}
In Ant 1.5, init() and properties are private to Ant.
A similar situation occurred when I wanted the SQLExec task to
output data in XML format. I ended up simply copying the SQLExec
task
(not subclassing) and added my functionality to the copy. Much
easier.
So I would like to, well, *raise awareness*, that you shouldn't be
over-eager with the private and final keywords, because it severely
cripples the extensibility of Ant itself.
Suggestion:
In all simplicity. Add a
protected void addProperty(Property property) {
if (newProject == null) {
reinit();
}
properties.addElement(p);
}
method to the Ant task. I would like to have protected accessors
for all fields, but for now, this is enough.
/LS
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