June 16th, 2010 | by Matt |

I've really been getting into Apache Ant lately. I really enjoy using it to manage various build processes when working on Flash projects. So when I found out that AIR 2.0 can invoke a native process I immediately thought that it'd be cool to learn how to use that capability to make an app that presents a UI for a given Ant build file and then be able to run its various targets from that UI. Thus I created a simple application that I'm calling, for the time being, rANT.

It took me a while to figure things out entirely but in the end I'm happy to have learned how to use flash.desktop.NativeProcess. Unfortunately, in order to realize my idea faster, I ignored the fact that the application would really depend on a user's system. For instance, I have Ant installed in such a way that its available as a system command so I can run it from the command line like any old DOS command. I know not everyone is setup like this andwould require knowing where Ant is installed on a user's system. Additionally, Ant doesn't come with a good old fashioned .exe file for Windows so I invoked Ant via C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe. Here's some pseudo code that comes straight from my application...

Another (little) thing was that Adobe isn't very clear about the fact that you need to package your application in a native installer in order to use the 'extendedDesktop' profile.  Took me a while to figure it out, but the good news its pretty darn easy to package a native installer from a .air file.

At any rate, its by no means ready for the public, but I wanted to share my work thus far to see if anyone else would be interested in an application such as this. So here's how it looks and works so far:

When you start the application you're presented with a screen that allows you to load a build file...

Once the file is loaded it displays information about the build file and a list of its available targets...

You can then select a task and run it. Here you can see the output in the TextArea component from when I ran the compile-docs target...

Some of my targets require arguments to be passed in for them to work. For instance, my compile-and-debug target requires a debugLevels parameter that specifies the various debug levels (info, status, etc.) to output to the debugging console (which happens to be de MonsterDebugger). So I created a little panel that lets me specify parameters for the target...

Lastly, here you can see the output from the compile-and-debug target after running it with the passed in parameters...

So thats it! And if anyone thinks this would be useful to them leave some comments and/or ideas.

P.S. I built it with robotlegs