Question

Intro:
I’m asking this before I try, fail and get frustrated as I have 0 experience with Apache Ant. A simple ‘yes this will work’ may suffice, or if it won’t please tell me what will.

Situation:
I’m working on a project that uses JavaFX to create a GUI. JavaFX relies on Java Bean-like objects that require a lot of boilerplate code for it’s properties. For example, all functionality I want to have is a String called name with default value “Unnamed”, or in a minimal Java syntax:

String name = "Unnamed";

In JavaFX the minimum amount of code increases a lot to give the same functionality (where functionality in this case means to me that I can set and get a certain variable to use in my program):

private StringProperty name = new StringProperty("Unnamed");
public final String getName() { return name.get(); }
public final void setName(String value) { name.set(value); }

Question: Can I use Ant to generate this boilerplate code?

It seems possible to make Ant scripts that function as (Java) preprocessors. For instance by using the regex replace (https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/replaceregexp.html) functions. I’m thinking of lines of code similar to this in my code, which then will be auto-replaced:

<TagToSignifyReplaceableLine> StringProperty person "Unnamed"

Final remark: As I’ve said before I have never used Ant before, so I want to check with you if 1) this can be done and 2) if this is a good way to do it or if there are better ways.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, possible. You can even implement your own Ant task, that does this job very easily.

Something like so in ant:

<taskdef name="codegen" classpath="bin/" classname="com.example.CodeGen" />

and then

<codegen className="Test.java">
   <Property name="StringProperty.name" value="Unnamed"/>
</codegen>

The CodeGen.java then like so:

public class CodeGen extends Task {
    private String className = null;
    private List properties = new ArrayList();

    public void setClassName(String className) {
        this.className = className;
    }

    /**
     * Called by ant for every <property> tag of the task.
     *  
     * @param property The property.
     */
    public void addConfiguredProperty(Property property) {
      properties.add(property);
    }

    public void execute() throws BuildException {
        // here we go!
    }

}