Build with ant in a new way

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm not sure if the title is proper, but I have a project to upgrade to weblogic 10, along with the upgrade I'm going to enhance the build files. Currently we have 450 ant file. There are many dependencies and all build files have hardcoded paths such "c:\sourcecode ...". Our application is about 6000000 lOC. Anyway, my job is to replace these paths with properties and change some old ant tasks.
You now imagine what I'm going to go through. Obviously, I need to edit 450 (can build tool for that) and do check in and out. Then test to make sure I didn't missed up with the dependency.
I'm no expert in ANT but we did some evaluation to ANT, Maven, Jam and we found ANT is the best fit for our environment because we have some structuring issues.
While working I have got this idea, however I'm not sure if it's the best, so I hope you can help here and give me your advice.
I will create a utilityBuild.xml. This ant file will contain the entire tasks we perform in all the 450. Rest of 450 ant will perform call to this utilityBuild.xml whenever it needs to do something e.g .
{color:#008000}<!-- Create Jar file of the classes in the ${tempdir} and then apply appc compilation on them-->{color}
<ant inheritAll="true" dir="${ROOT}" antfile="${UTILITYBUILD}" target="appc"/>
Note: UTILITYBUILD = utilityBuild.xml
UtilityBuild.xml has this task as
{color:#008000}<!-- Perform weblogic.appc on the given Jar file to generate the Skeleton files -->{color}
<target name="appc" depends="jar.ejb" >
<java classname="weblogic.appc" fork="yes">
<sysproperty key="weblogic.home" value="${WL_HOME}"/>
<arg line="-compiler javac ${appdir}/${jarfile}"/>
<classpath>
<pathelement path="$classpath"/>
</classpath>
</java>
</target>
The {color:#ff0000}*benefit*{color} of doing this is {color:#ff0000}*if we decide to use wlcompile and wlappc instead of the above we only need to change one place utilityBuild.xml*{color} . I understand that I can make a custom ant task instead of relying on the properties that's passed when calling the child ant task.
{color:#0000ff}*For complete Source file* {color}
UtilityBuild.xml
<project name="SIMIS" basedir=".">
<!-- set global properties for this build -->
<property environment="env"/>
<property file="gosi.properties"/>
<target name="maketempdir" description="Create ${tempdir} directory">
<echo message="#### S T A R T B U I L D I N G ####"/>
<echo message="Started on ${TODAY} at ${TSTAMP}"/>
<mkdir dir="${tempdir}"/>
<mkdir dir="${tempdir}/META-INF"/>
<copy todir="${tempdir}/META-INF">
<fileset dir="${xmldir}">
<include name="*.xml"/>
</fileset>
</copy>
</target>
<!-- Clean all build related dirs, jars and xmls -->
<target name="cleantemp" description="Deletes ${build.dir}/** and ${dist.dir}/**." >
<delete includeEmptyDirs="true" failonerror="false">
<fileset dir="${clientclasses}" includes="**/*EJB.class"/>
<fileset dir="${tempdir}" includes="**/*"/>
</delete>
<delete dir="${tempdir}"/>
<echo message="#### E N D B U I L D I N G ####"/>
</target>
<!-- Perform weblogic.appc on the given Jar file to generate the Skeleton files -->
<target name="appc" depends="jar.ejb" >
<java classname="weblogic.appc" fork="yes">
<sysproperty key="weblogic.home" value="${WL_HOME}"/>
<arg line="-compiler javac ${appdir}/${jarfile}"/>
<classpath>
<pathelement path="$classpath"/>
</classpath>
</java>
</target>
<target name="jar.ejb" >
<jar jarfile="${appdir}/${jarfile}"
basedir="${tempdir}" update="yes">
</jar>
</target>
<target name="javac">
<javac srcdir="${sourcedir}" destdir="${destinationdir}" includes="${include}" excludes="${exclude}" classpath="${classpath}" />
</target>
<target name="copy" description="copy contents to directory">
<copy todir="${todir}">
<fileset dir="${fromdir}">
<include name="${include}"/>
<exnclude name="${exclude}"/>
</fileset>
</copy>
</target>
<target name="clean" description="clean contents of directory">
<delete includeEmptyDirs="true" failonerror="false">
<fileset dir="${cleandir}" includes="${include}" excludes="${exclude}"/>
</delete>
</target>
<target name="delete" description="delete entire directory">
<delete dir="${deletedir}"/>
</target>
<!-- deploy split directory application -->
<target name="deploy"
description="Deploy ear to WebLogic on ${wls.hostname}:${wls.port}.">
<wldeploy
user="${wls.username}"
password="${wls.password}"
adminurl="t3://${wls.hostname}:${wls.port}"
debug="true"
action="deploy"
source="${appdir}/${jarfile}"
failonerror="${failondeploy}"/>
</target>
</project>
CMN_Core_Session.xml (one of the 450 files)
<project name="default" default="build">
<!-- Specific Properties to this file. Please don't change these names, because it has been used by the ${UTILITYBUILD} -->
<property file="../gosi.properties"/>
<property name="srcdir" value="${SOURCE_CODE}/gosi/core"/>
<property name="xmldir" value="${SOURCE_CODE}/gosi/core/projects/session"/>
<property name="jarfile" value="CMN_Session.jar"/>
<!-- Main build task for this ant file -->
<target name="build" description="Builds components.">
<!-- Create Temp folders and copy the deployment descriptor their -->
<ant inheritAll="true" dir="${ROOT}" antfile="${UTILITYBUILD}" target="maketempdir"/>
<!-- Compile the java classes in to ${clientclasses} -->
<ant inheritAll="true" dir="${ROOT}" antfile="${UTILITYBUILD}" target="javac">
<property name="sourcedir" value="${srcdir}"/>
<property name="destinationdir" value="${clientclasses}"/>
<property name="include" value="**/*Session.java,**/*SessionHome.java"/>
<property name="exclude" value="**/*MaintainDateChangeSession.java,**/*MaintainDateChangeSessionEJB.java,**/*MaintainDateChangeSessionHome.java,**/*MaintainHolidaysSession.java,**/*MaintainHolidaysSessionEJB.java,**/*MaintainHolidaysSessionHome.java,**/*StartupUtilitySession.java,**/*StartupUtilitySessionEJB.java,**/*StartupUtilitySessionHome.java,**/UserSession.java"/>
</ant>
<!-- Compile the java classes again in to ${tempdir} this folder will be used to create the Jar file -->
<ant inheritAll="true" dir="${ROOT}" antfile="${UTILITYBUILD}" target="javac">
<property name="sourcedir" value="${srcdir}"/>
<property name="destinationdir" value="${tempdir}"/>
<property name="include" value="**/*Session.java,**/*SessionHome.java,**/*SessionEJB.java"/>
<property name="exclude" value="**/*MaintainDateChangeSession.java,**/*MaintainDateChangeSessionEJB.java,**/*MaintainDateChangeSessionHome.java,**/*MaintainHolidaysSession.java,**/*MaintainHolidaysSessionEJB.java,**/*MaintainHolidaysSessionHome.java,**/*StartupUtilitySession.java,**/*StartupUtilitySessionEJB.java,**/*StartupUtilitySessionHome.java,**/UserSession.java"/>
</ant>
<!-- Create Jar file of the classes in the ${tempdir} and then apply appc compilation on them-->
<ant inheritAll="true" dir="${ROOT}" antfile="${UTILITYBUILD}" target="appc"/>
<!-- Remove all file in ${tempdir} -->
<ant inheritAll="true" dir="${ROOT}" antfile="${UTILITYBUILD}" target="cleantemp"/>
</ant>
</target>
<!-- Main deploy task for this ant file -->
<target name="deploy" description="Deploy the components">
<ant inheritAll="true" dir="${ROOT}" antfile="${UTILITYBUILD}" target="deploy"/>
</ant>
</target>
</project>
gosiProperties file
### Build Files Properties File ###
-- Configure the global properties for the ant build files
-- You may need to change this section to match your machine
BEA_HOME=C:/bea
SIMIS_DOMAIN=${BEA_HOME}/gosiprojects/server/simis
WL_HOME=${BEA_HOME}/wlserver_10.0/server
JAVA_HOME=${BEA_HOME}/jdk150_06
SOURCE_CODE=C:/sourcecode
ROOT=${SOURCE_CODE}/build_files
UTILITYBUILD=UtilityBuild.xml
-- Here we set the JARs directory and server and client classes
appdir=${SIMIS_DOMAIN}/applications
tempdir=${SIMIS_DOMAIN}/classes
clientclasses=${SIMIS_DOMAIN}/clientclasses
serverclasses=${SIMIS_DOMAIN}/serverclasses
web-inf=${appdir}/GOSI/WEB-INF/classes
startup=${appdir}/StartUp/WEB-INF/classes
-- Set the ClassPath for the ant tool
classpath=${JAVA_HOME}/lib/tools.jar;${WL_HOME}/lib/weblogic.jar;${WL_HOME};${SIMIS_DOMAIN}/APP-INF/lib/CMN_DMS_WS_RequestClient.jar;
Thanks and regards
Edited by: Nawaf on Mar 9, 2008 8:18 AM

Answer 1

Any idea, I'm looking for your opinion, what do you think of the above