Ant is a subproject of the The Apache Jakarta Project at http://jakarta.apache.org/

Quote from the Ant documentation:

Ant is a Java based build tool. In theory it is kind of like "make" without makes wrinkles and with the full portability of pure java code.

You need to have Ant version 1.3 installed on your system.

Ant needs a XML parser and one is provided with Ant. We recommend that you use Xerces 1.3.1 or newer as XML parser. Xerces can be found at http://xml.apache.org/

When using Ant with VAInstall you don't use the VAInstall property vainstall.archive.filelist that points to a file that describes files and scripts that should be included in a installation archive.

The Ant task for VAInstall is a first version and not testet with a fullblown build. Please give feedback to the VAInstall team if you experiences any problems or have ideas for improvements.

In the examples/anttask directory we have provided an example on how VAInstall and Ant can be used.

The interesting file is hello.xml which is the Ant build file.

In order to use VAInstall with Ant you have define the task:

    <taskdef name="vainstall" 
             classname="com.memoire.vainstall.ant.VAInstallTask"/>
  

The next thing to setup the properties needed for VAInstall. You can do this by referring to a file containing the properties or explicit write the properties in the build file:

    <property file="hello.vai"/>
  

Now you can use the vainstall task. This is from the example:

    <vainstall>
      <fileset dir="src"/>
      <javalauncher scriptname="hello_withargs"
                    javaclass="hello"
                    classargs="good,example"
                    javamode="console"
                    javaargs="-mx64m"
                    classpath="java"
                    />
      <javalauncher scriptname="hello_noarg"
                    javaclass="hello"
                    classpath="java"
                    />
    </vainstall>
  

You can specify files to be included in using the fileset type. You can use one or more fileset statements. The attributes for the fileset statement is documented in the Ant documentation.

You can specify scripts using the javalauncher type. You can use one or more javalauncher statements.

The attributes for the javalauncher statement is documented on the File list page in this manual. The only differnce is that you have to use lower letter attribute names.