Calling Ant from a JSP page

["Massa, Ray" <RM...@ea.com>]

Has anyone successful called Ant from a JSP page?

thanks

ray

Re: Calling Ant from a JSP page

[Conor MacNeill <co...@cortexebusiness.com.au>]

Jeff Turner wrote:
> 
> I would appreciate it if proponents of "doing it properly" either provide code
> to demonstrate how to embed Ant (with all command-line functionality intact), 
> or remove that (IMHO) misleading comment.

The comment is not misleading - it is entirely right and running Main 
inside a server will most likely upset the server in some way. At the 
very least it will cause the server's system.out to be directed into 
Ant's event system. Not too cool.

I agree that the access levels on some of this stuff makes it difficult 
and that should be addressed (I will try to address soon, but patches 
are welcome in the meantime).

> 
> Save yourself a lot of trouble 

But do so with the knowledge that it is not recommended. If it all goes 
pear-shaped, you'll know why.

Conor

Re: Calling Ant from a JSP page

[Jeff Turner <je...@socialchange.net.au>]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 11:44:25AM -0700, Massa, Ray wrote:
> Has anyone successful called Ant from a JSP page?

Yes, I'm calling Ant from a JSP for a project now.

I started by following the advice in the javadocs for
org.apache.tools.ant.Main:
  
  "If you integrating Ant into some other tool, this is not the class to use as
  an entry point. Please see the source code of this class to see how it
  manipulates the Ant project classes."

After about 2 days of wasted effort, I gave up. JDD never actually tried doing 
this; if he had, he'd have made more private and package-scoped methods public
;) It's obviously possible, but not by mere mortals with deadlines to meet.

I would appreciate it if proponents of "doing it properly" either provide code
to demonstrate how to embed Ant (with all command-line functionality intact), 
or remove that (IMHO) misleading comment.

Save yourself a lot of trouble and take the quick'n'dirty approach of tools
like cruise control[1]; simply invoke org.apache.tools.ant.Main. You need to
set a SecurityManager just before, to prevent System.exit() killing your VM.

Another thing that bit me; synchronize your Ant call. If you don't, you'll get
NPEs deep in Ant code which (for some reason) kill Tomcat 3.2.x.

Anyway, I've wrapped up all the above into a little project, at:

http://newgate.socialchange.net.au/~jeff/apache/jakarta/jakarta-ant/antrunner/

It uses the SecurityManager classes from cruisecontrol. There's an example JSP
in that directory too, which shows how to log the build info to an XML file in
the current dir. You can then use the log.xsl bundled with Ant to present it to
the user.

HTH,

--Jeff

[1] http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/



> thanks
> 
> ray

RE: Calling Ant from a JSP page

["Carter A. Thompson" <ca...@voxeo.com>]

I have a JSP page that runs a Perl script that calls Ant.  In 
your case I suppose you could just substitute the perl script for
an Ant call directly.

In your JSP Page use something like this:

Process myProc = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd /c ant");

or for Unix use one of the various shells at your disposal:

Process myProc = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("sh  ant");

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Carter.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Massa, Ray [mailto:RMassa@ea.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 11:44 AM
> To: 'ant-user@jakarta.apache.org'
> Cc: 'rmassa@quarium.com'
> Subject: Calling Ant from a JSP page
> 
> 
> Has anyone successful called Ant from a JSP page?
> 
> thanks
> 
> ray