Do you know alternatives in Ant to generate project documentation? - ant

I'm wondering are there more current and active alternative tools to the Apache Forrest product for project documentation that developers are using?. It seems to be stuck in v0.8 release since 2007.
I'm thinking about using the maven site via Ant to generate a HTML report with the various javadoc, pmd and findbug reports for my project. Just wondering what other developers are using out there.

maven can grenerate copious amounts of project documentation.
I'd point you to the maven documentation for this, but the maven documentation is, ironically, rubbish.

We generate most of our documentation from source using a new open source build system for Java called EBuild (features) that is a great alternative to Maven. You may have to adopt EBuild-specific conventions to make the most of that though.
There's some detailed articles on the deficiencies of Ant and also Maven on the site.

Related

How to Configure SonarQube for delphi?

I want to configure SonarQube so it can analyze Delphi project too, and when I search online I saw there used to be a delphi plugin for SonarQube. But when I look at the plugins with the latest build it doesn't show the delphi plugin.
Is the plugin still available in an other way?
Or is it possible to configure SonarQube for delphi without the plugin?
As of G. Ann response was actually discontinued puglin for Sonar, but searching the internet, and recently (3 days) the developer Fabricio Columbus made it happen!
We tested and is running the current version of Sonar:
Compatible with SonarQube 4.5.x and SonarQube 5.1.2
https://github.com/fabriciocolombo/sonar-delphi
Release: https://github.com/fabriciocolombo/sonar-delphi/releases
JAR: https://github.com/fabriciocolombo/sonar-delphi/releases/download/0.3.3-SNAPSHOT/sonar-delphi-plugin-0.3.3-SNAPSHOT.jar
PS: Translated from Portuguese to English by Google Translate.
To analyze the files of language X, you need a plugin for language X that recognize's X's structure, syntax &etc. Without that you can't derive metrics (LOC, complexity, &etc.) or recognize bad code (i.e. raise issues for antipatterns.) So to answer your second question first, you won't be able to analyze Delphi code without some kind of Delphi plugin.
The Delphi plugin was deprecated quite a while ago because it seemed to suffer from a lack of interest all around & didn't evolve to maintain compatibility with the platform as it evolved.
If you look, you can find downloads of the old plugin, but to use it, you'd have to retrogress to a quite old version of the platform, & I don't recommend that. I'm not sure how far back you'd have to go - you could crack open the jar and get that from the pom - but it looks like the last mailing list activity on this plugin was Feb. 2012. So again, I don't recommend going this route.

how to build eclipse rcp application from .product with ant on jenkins

I'd like to build an Eclipse RCP application.
I have a Product configuration file and a target platform with lots of third party plugins. The export from the Eclipse IDE works flawlessly. But that is hardly professional. So I'd like to get it to work on Jenkins, too. The build server gets the files from SVN, doesn't have Eclipse and should do it all headlessly anyway.
I do not want to use Maven/Tycho or Buckminster. I'd like to do it a simple as possible. Since I know a bit about ant already, I would like to do it all with ant. I have an ant script with which I can build all my plugins. All I need right now, is to assemble them all into the product with a launcher (.exe) and such. Like the export wizard does. But without the Eclipse IDE.
I've been googling my fingers off, but somehow it appears as if I'm the only one who wants do build an Eclipse RCP product with ant. I only find tutorials that are from 2005 or that go so much in depth, a newbie (like me) doesn't get past the first paragraph.
Please help!
If you really want ant, check PDE build.
However, I really recommend using Tycho instead. It makes building an Eclipse RCP a lot easier.
I've been down this road you are on. Trust me... you will end up with something incredibly more complicated with Ant than you would if you just use Tycho/Maven. You said you want it simple as possible, and IMHO, Tycho is it.
There are examples here... http://wiki.eclipse.org/Tycho/Packaging_Types
I also suggest to check out tycho from git and look around the tycho-demo location. They have great examples there too.
http://git.eclipse.org/c/tycho/org.eclipse.tycho.git/tree/tycho-demo/itp04-rcp
Plus, Jenkins is super easy when dealing with Maven builds.
The current version of Tycho is 0.13.0. It's pretty early in it's life, and under active development, so it's getting better every day.

Purpose of maven-source-plugin and maven-javadoc-plugin?

I've been doing some research on the maven source and javadoc plugins, and I wanted to inquire a bit about the usage of each.
I understand conceptually how the plugins work, and what they do.
What I'm confused about, is why you would want to bundle sources or javadoc along with your artifact. Doesn't the javadoc get published when you do site:deploy? If I am creating a JAR library that will be used as a dependency of another project in eclipse, will attaching javadoc or sources enable me to see the javadoc in eclipse when using functions in that library, whereas if I fail to use the javadoc plugin, they won't be available?
What is "forked-path" and "jar-no-fork"? They seem to be relevant to this. Like I said I've done a lot of researching, I just can't tie it all together. Thanks!
Eclipse and other tools know how to download source and javadoc artifacts and use them to show you doc and source of your dependencies.
Forked-path and jar-no-fork are just about not running out of memory.

How can I build PDF LaTeX documents with ANT (or some other build system if you prefer)?

The team I work for manages a large collection of technical documentation which is written in LaTeX.
Currently all the documentation we have is manually built by the editors and then checked into a version control system. Sometimes people forget to compile their documents so we have a situation where the PDF and .tex files are often out of step. Unfortunately when this happens our users find themselves reading old versions of our document.
I've managed to hack a simple script to build PDFs using Make - it's rather clumsy.
I was wondering if there was a better way to do it? Most people in our department use Eclipse + Pydev for a Python project which means we are all very familiar with this IDE. I know that Ant plays nicely with Eclipse, so might we be able to use this tool for our doc building?
So what's the best way of doing this? I hope I will not have to learn everything there is to know about a new build-system in order to automate the building of some quite simple docs.
There is an external Ant task for LaTeX PDF generation, though the site is in German.
To use it, download the jar to a location on your machine, then define a taskdef as follows:
<taskdef name="latex" classname="de.dokutransdata.antlatex.LaTeX"
classpath="/path/to/ant/lib/ant_latex.jar"/>
Then to use it, define a target like this:
<target name="doLaTeX">
<latex
latexfile="${ltx2.file}"
verbose="on"
clean="on"
pdftex="off"
workingDir="${basedir}"
/>
</target>
Where ltx2.file is the file to process.
This is a link to the howto page listing the parameters. If you need any more options, my German is just about passable enough to explain, maybe.
There is also a maven plugin for LaTeX, but I can't find any documentation.
Haven't tried it, but I remember seeing a blog post about it.
If you know python, this blog post might be interesting
EDIT: Also, I would assume that you're using some kind of version control system, and I can't say for sure, but I use git to manage all my latex docs, and it might be possible to use some kind of post-commit hook to execute a script to rebuild the document. This would depend on how your repository is structured... just thinking out loud, so to speak.
I went into great detail on a large number of build systems for latex in this question, but its slightly different in your case. I think you want rubber or latexmk. The latex-makefile seems a good idea, but only supports building via postscript, which might not be your build process.
In general, its a good idea to keep generated files outside of version control for just this reason. A good exception is when specialist build tools are not widely available, and your situation sounds similar. You might do better with a commit-hook to build automatically upon commit.
I guess I should also point out that committing something without first building it and checking it is a deadly sin, so a better solution might be to stamp that out.
Maven is a better alternative as build system compared to Ant. So I would recommend a maven-plugin to generate PDF from LaTeX sources. Have a look at mathan-latex-maven-plugin

Java builder with proper dependency handling

After a recent juggling with our ant scripts I've started to wonder if something better is possible.
I need a builder that will know to recompile all required .java files for me.
For ex. for this structure
public class A { ]
public class B extends A {}
public class C {
B b;
}
For: Compile('C') Will know to compile A, B, C.
For: B changed, Compile('C') will know to recompile just B.
I know of several alternatives, Ivy which seems like an extension of ant which is our current java builder. Scons which we are currently using for building C++ code, scons is excellent in doing the above described behavior for C code. Then there are reports of Maven being almost but not quite there.
What would you suggest? What tools are you using Free Software / Commercial for you build system?
Thank you,
Maxim.
Ant, with 'depend' task and with 'closure' option turned on
'make', from IDEA ide
None of ivy, scons or maven will help you with your problem as stated.
What do you mean by "for Compile('C')"? I don't think this is what you have in your ant file.
For this case, Ant should be working as desired: you have described its default behaviour. In the same javac element, Ant will only recompile changed classes. See the Ant manual entry for the javac task, especially the 'includeDestClasses' attribute.
You should probably post an example ant file that you are finding inadequate.
maven, both for my personal and my commercial products
In your question you describe inter-class dependencies. Most build systems, in particular Maven, are aimed more at inter-project dependencies. I believe most systems just recompile all the classes in a project and most of the benefits of these build systems is in building as few projects as possible.
Both Maven and Ivy will allow you to easily specify both external and internal dependencies of your project, including which version of the project you depend on. They will both also automatically download external libraries (such as apache commons) to your local machine as part of the build process if they are not already locally cached, saving a lot of work manually downloading and organizing third party jar files.
Ivy is an extension of ant, like you mention. I recommend Maven. It is a convention oriented build system that I've used successfully and feel is quite mature. Maven requires far less up front effort to start using and is quite extensible.

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