Hello JavaRanch,
. At Mr. Holloway's suggestion, I've started delving into
Ant. Successful installation, "Ant -version" tells me its version and date!
. At first I had a smidge of trouble with writing "Build.xml", but I realized that WordPad was adding unseen characters and have switched to notepad (yes, I'm on a Windows machine, XP if it matters).
. This is the complete content of my Build.xml:
Typing "ant" on the command line results in the following output:
Buildfile: C:\Documents and Settings\zanders\build.xml
BUILD FAILED
C:\Documents and Settings\zanders\build.xml:3: Unexpected element "{}jar" {antlib:org.apache.tools.ant}jar
Total time: 0 seconds.
. Because it says it's breaking on line 3, which is the end of the file, I expect there are other elements it wants to see along with the <jar> block. However, this is almost identical to their sample simple jar build. Did I miss a part where it said, "You have to add this to these other lines in the build file", or "every build file has to start with X"?
. An other consideration that might be important is that I'm using the java.class files constructed by an
IDE (JDeveloper, if it matters). There's some oddity in that there are more .class files in that folder than I started with, i.e. I wrote "moduleA.java" and the class folder contains "moduleA.class" and "moduleA$randomOrganization.class", and I don't ever remember writing something called "Huffman.java" but there's a "Huffman.class". Would you recommend I use Ant to classify my
java code as well? (It would be an ugly process, as there are dozens of files, but I think I can figure it out.)
. I will, of course, be reading on my own to solve this problem (as well as the problem of "I haven't
formally studied this stuff in a decade"), but I'd appreciate any non-null pointers you're willing to lend.
Thanks for your brains,
Zachary Anderson