Hi Building AOO's Java code is currently mostly done with dmake and gbuild. Both are ugly, unsupported by Java IDEs, and impossibly problematic with some development I've been doing, so I began looking for an alternative.
It turns out we also have Ant, which is well established, supported by most Java IDEs, and already a build requirement for AOO. But it's not that widely used in AOO at the moment, only called from dmake, and used in a very ugly way: dmake passes lots of properties to Ant to specify build settings and paths to dependencies, making the build.xml file useless without dmake - when Eclipse opens it, the dependencies are missing, as the properties they would be in aren't set. So I was thinking, why does Ant have to go through dmake? Can't it work out settings from the ./configure output the way dmake and gbuild do? Apparently, it can! As of revision 1804591, I've changed main/set_soenv.in to also write variables into a main/ant.properties file, in addition to the usual main/LinuxX86Env.Set.sh (which we "source"). The Ant project's build.xml can then include this file (eg. using <property file="../ant.properties"/>), and have available all the properties that normally exist as environment variables. It can then use those properties to work out build settings and paths to dependencies. This means: 1. No "source LinuxX86Env.Set.sh" is necessary for Ant to work. 2. Ant operates independently and can build that individual project by itself, without being called from a parent build tool like dmake. 3. (At least) Eclipse can now cleanly open the Ant build.xml, find all the JARs it depends on, and successfully compile the project :-). The only minor problem is that Eclipse writes the .class files into a "build" directory in the project instead of the module's output directory where Ant does, but that's probably because the module output directory isn't a subdirectory of the project directory. I've only changed main/connectivity/java/sdbc_hsqldb uses these Ant improvements for now, but I plan to add more. Damjan
