Viewing by month: October 2006

Ant, Eclipse, and FTP

I'm having an absolute bear of a time getting Eclipse to play nicely with Subversion, Eclipse, and an Ant build file. One of the wonderful things about working with Dreamweaver is the great FTP integration. I can upload, download, all that wonderful stuff, with a single keyboard shortcut directly in the IDE. I'm not having any such luck with Eclipse.

I think the problem is that I'm not only needing FTP access, I also need Subversion/Subclipse integration. It's my understanding that I can "import" from an FTP site and I forever have a connection through the Team plugins. Unfortunately, I need to "import" from a Subversion repository in order to keep things up to date that way. This makes it damn impossible to use any sort of built in FTP integration inside Eclipse.

To try and get around this I've been playing with Ant (thanks Jared) and build.xml files. The hope is that I can create an Autobuild file that will upload a file any time it's created or changed (I'm not ambitious enough yet to tackle file deletions, bear with me here). Unfortunately, the only thing I've (that means Jared) been able to find is the "depends" attribute of the <target> tag. Unfortunately, this also doesn't seem to work worth a damn... It always uploads the entire project any time a single file changes. The depends attribute isn't checking to see whether anything is newer or not.

The most frustrating part of all of this is trying to find good documentation on complex processes. I've spent several hours on google digging through blog posts, forums, Ant documentation and trying to download jar files, write build scripts, and rebuild workspaces, and nothing seems to work as you'd expect. It seems you need to have a greybeard Java developer looking over your shoulder in order to use Ant, or make it do anything you really want it to.

Can someone prove me wrong, and help me figure out how I can make Eclipse just upload a file when I save it? Is that so much to ask? Please???

5 comments | Posted by Daniel Short on Oct 29, 2006 at 12:00 AM | Categories: Dreamweaver - ColdFusion - Rambling -