- The ability for
us to add whatever ant task we think we want to (right now, there's a javadoc
target, using the javadoc ant task, in the future, we may want others).
- Not having to
visit two build interfaces to keep things in sync
I agree that this would be great. We’ll see how close to this
goal we can get.
Is full ant
functionality surfaced through the IDE?
Not in the way I think
you mean. There are GUIs to configure eclipse plug-in projects that are pretty
extensive. Eclipse folks just let the GUI create the internal Ant scripts for
them. And I’m not sure what one would like to do *within the Eclipse way of doing things*
that can’t be done with the GUI.
Last time I used
the internal IDE builders, I couldn't do what I wanted, but I'm not very
experienced. OTOH, I haven't yet seen an ant task which can produce an
eclipse plugin either.
If one really wants to build an Eclipse plug-in externally using
Ant, there is a feature in the IDE to export the build.xml for that plug-in.
But folks hardly ever do it.
In the Bandit
project, we've used an Ant script and made the eclipse IDE use that ant script
(by using an external tool builder and turning off the Java builder). We have
not, however built an eclipse plugin this way.
Yes, Eclipse has an Ant editor/parser and puts some GUI sugar
around existing Ant scripts. Lets you run their various targets from the GUI in
the same VM or in a separate one, etc.