Compiling ColdFusion via Ant

Question

Just a word of warning foe those contemplating using Ant to
build ColdFusion applications: here be dragons.
I was having problems getting an application to compile with
the ColdFusion compile task for Ant. It would die silently halfway
through the compile with no indication of what the probelm with. I
was forced to actually decompile the various classes in Adobe's
cfusion.jar file to try and figure out what might be going wrong.
And holy batman spadhetti code... Whoever wrote that code should be
deeply ashamed of themselves.
It is nasty, extremely fragile code that makes liberal use of
System.exit, System.println, and System.err.... all of which do not
play well with Ant at all. Bottom line: the compiler was throwing a
System.exit and causing Ant to silently fail -- and of course, the
error message gets lost at the same time.
In the end, I had to write my own Ant task which installs a
custom SecurityManager that intecepts the System.exit and turns it
into an exception -- what it should be in the first place.
If anyone has successfully used the compiler with Ant, I'd
love to hear how well it worked in practice.

Answer 1

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Matt Coarr ([email protected]):
Has anyone tried to configure jakarta ant to compile sqlj programs?
This should be possible using the classes in translator.zip, in particular sqlj.translator.*.
Any comments/suggestions/recommendations?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
I've just started porting a makefile that does jpub/sqlj work to ant.
<pre>
<target name="jpub" depends="prepare">
<java classname="${jpub.main}"
args="-props=${jpub.propfile}"
fork="yes"
failonerror="yes">
<classpath>
<pathelement location="translator.zip"/>
<pathelement location="classes12.zip"/>
</classpath>
</java>
</target>
<target name="sqlj" depends="jpub">
<java classname="${sqlj.main}"
args="-props=${jpub.propfile} gen/*"
fork="yes"
failonerror="yes">
<classpath>
<pathelement location="translator.zip"/>
<pathelement location="classes12.zip"/>
</classpath>
</java>
</target>
</pre>
is a snippet of the build.xml.
DISCLAIMER This isn't polished, it omits a bunch of detail, AND the sqlj target DOESN'T WORK.
BUT, the reason that the sqlj task fails is that sqlj wants a list of files (it complains about wildcards like "gen/* ")
I'm looking into a good way to feed it a bunch of files (~100 in our project), but for a small list of files, you could just specify them in the args=" ... " task attribute.
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