We had a private email discussion with Dominik about his pbx2ant project
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pbx2ant/) and its possible integration
with WOProject. The idea behind pbx2ant seems interesting in the light of
the recent discussions on wodev about better integration of Ant build
process and PBX and PBWO. See my comments inline:
At 12:43 PM 6/29/2002 +0200, Dominik Westner wrote:
>So far I can only read pbx.project files. The plan is to make all the
>information available for ant, e.g. as filesets, targets ... (this should
>be not too much work anymore)
>The next step would be to write or call the shell scripts the
>ProjectBuilder uses to assemble the app or framework (that's some more work).
>Finally I wanted to get rid of the scripts and do my own assembly directly
>with ant (that's what woproject does as far as I understood).
>
>So actually I can skip the final and the intermediate step if I integrate
>pbx2ant with woproject.
>
>The woproject task would just use the filesets and other information the
>pbx2ant task provides.
>
>Do you think that's a reasonable road to take?
Yes. I am very positive on the idea of the integration.
>An other addition would be to generate a pb / or pbx file from ant (this
>could be a little harder.)
I think this is even more important than real-time reverse-engineering of
pbx.project. Here is why:
1. Ant buildfiles unlike PB*, are pattern based. Addition/removal of the
new files will not affect build.xml. Reverse-engineering maybe important as
"step 0", to create an initial build.xml, but after that it will be pretty
much static.
2. Forward-engineering (generate pbx.project or PB.project from build.xml)
on the other hand is crucial for cross-platform, cross-IDE development.
Since ProjectBuilder will need a way to autoimport any changes to the
project made by people who used other IDE's, also this will solve CVS merge
issues with pb*.project - you simply won't need to check it in to CVS
anymore. I am already looking into a new WOProject ant task: PBIndexer. It
will create PB.project on Windows from a set of directories. Extending
"pbx2ant" to a "ant2pbx" is extremely important.
>finally just the reason for me to use ant at all is:
>a) faster builds (I think the way PB and PBX assemble an app is quite slow
>and could be much faster)
>b) be able to build on plattforms where no PB or PBX is available
>c) finally be able to use other tools like JBuilder for App development
>(at least as a replacement for PB(X) one would still want to use EOModeler
>and WOBuilder ... I guess)
This is exactly a WOProject goal statement :-).
Andrus
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Sat Jun 29 2002 - 13:21:31 EDT