How to run AWT or Swing from Ant

[Siegfried Heintze]

I was playing around with the samples from "Java Development with Ant" and discovered that if I create a console mode java program, the java tag in my build.xml works fine.

However, if I create a AWT or Swing program, ant marches right on and does not pause to execute the program. I see it flash briefly and then ant kills it.

Why is this? Can I make ant execute an AWT or Swing program so I get to kill it before ant does?

Thanks,
Siegfried

[Tim Holloway]

What does your Ant task definition look like?

[Siegfried Heintze]

I got this from Eric Hatcher's book. I hope this does not loose the intdentation after I hit the "Add Reply" button.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 
<!--
 Begin commands to execute this file using Ant with bash
 ant
 End commands to execute this file using Ant with bash
-->
 
<project name="" default="execute" >
<description>Compiles and runs a simple program</description>
 
  <target name="init">
    <mkdir dir="build/classes" />
    <mkdir dir="dist" />
  </target>
 
  <target name="compile" depends="init" description="Compiles the source code">
    <javac srcdir="." destdir="build/classes" />
  </target>
 
  <target name="archive" depends="compile" description="Creates the JAR file">
    <jar destfile="dist/.jar" basedir="build/classes" />
  </target>
  
  <target name="clean" depends="init" description="Removes the temporary directories used">
    <delete dir="build" />
    <delete dir="dist" />
  </target>
  
  <target name="execute" depends="compile" description="run the program">
    <echo level="warning" message="running" />
    <java classname="package_name_goes_here.deleteme" classpath="build/classes">
      <arg value="a"/> 
      <arg value="b"/> 
      <arg file="."/> 
    </java>
  </target>
</project>
 

[Nathaniel Hansberry]

Ran into a similar situation so I added an input after the swing task: https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/input.html <- far from elegant but it worked for my purposes