ant-intellij-tasksAutomated build at your fingertips

tomer@tomergabel.com

http://code.google.com/p/ant-intellij-tasks/

Agenda

Mission statement

Architecture

Customization

Overview and limitations

Customizing tests

Customizing packaging

What’s next?

Mission statement

Developers typically employ at least three tools:

Code editor;

Project structure manager (modules, dependencies and compilation options);

Build system

In the Java world, the first two are typically handled by the IDE (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA etc.)

The build system is typically separate, and requires duplicating the project structure in the form of Ant or Maven scripts

Mission statement

Keeping two different project structure definitions means:

Duplication of effort;

Manual synchronization is error-prone;

Synchronization issues are often subtle, hard to detect and resolve

ant-intellij-tasks is an open source (Apache license) build system which complements IntelliJ IDEA and builds on its project structure.

Architecture

ant-intellij-tasks comprises three components:

ant-intellij-tasks.jar - Extends Ant with IntelliJ-IDEA-related tasks

common.xml - Provides common functionality (e.g. “build module”, “test module” etc.)

build-all.xml: A project-wide build script

Typically these three are enough to enable automated builds with no further customizations

Architecture

ant-intellij-tasks.jar is an Ant task library primarily capable of:

Parsing project (.ipr) and module (.iml) files

Resolving module build order

Per-module resolution of:

Source/test directories

Source/test output paths (relative, absolute or project-inherited)

Classpath

Resources

Architecture

common.xml implements the four classic build targets:

Clean module output

Build module – currently only Java is supported

Package module - currently only JARs and WARs are supported

Test module – currently only with JUnit. Test classes must follow the convention *Test.java, *Tests.java or Test*.java)

Architecture

build-all.xml extends the module targets to the entire project

Entire codebase can be built with one command:ant –f build-all.xml package

Modules are resolved and processed in the correct build order

A module can override the default behavior by providing its own build.xml

Customization

Typically the build is “customized” by tweaking the project settings within IntelliJ IDEA

It may, however, be necessary to additionally customize the build process

Typically this is done by adding a custom build.xml to a module directory

The four targets (clean, build, test, package) are then delegated to the custom script

Set the project-file property to the project file location

Override by defining a new target with the same name

Call the default script using<antcall target=“common.target” />

Customization: Tests

Maximum heap size can be set with the junit.maxmemory property. (The default is defined by junit.maxmemory.default)

Pass system properties by prefixing junit.properties to the system property name

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><project> <import file="../libraries/ant/common.xml" />

<target name="test"> <property name="project-file" location="../Delver.ipr" /> <property name="junit.properties.lucene.version" value="2.9-dev" /> <property name="junit.maxmemory" value="128m" /> <antcall target="common.test" /> </target></project>

Customization: Limitations

ant-intellij-tasks was designed to resolve IntelliJ IDEA metadata files, and leave most of the heavy lifting to Ant

Due to time constraints, this design goal is not always met:

Global libraries are not supported

Packaged JARs and WARs cannot only be customized by tweaking the packaging instructions or manually manipulating the output

What’s next?

Cleanup

Better script documentation

Better JavaDocs

Significant work on test corpus

Apache license headers

Testing on Linux

Optimization

Caching parsed modules/projects

Reusing build artifacts if they’re up-to-date

Reusing build artifacts for packaging

Questions, comments and groans are welcome!Visit the project page at http://code.google.com/p/ant-intellij-tasks/ or send feedback directly to tomer@tomergabel.com