ANT and CFBuilder

SO, I am an ANT Newbie. I noticed though that CFBuilder has ANT built in, which I thought was cool, I mean, I see blog posts and twitter posts about ANT, but I would have to say that I wasn't overly tempted to try it for myself. Well this is a new year, so I am pushing my boundaries.

Anyways, so I looked at ANT a bit last week, and found it intriguing. All the samples that were on the site though were for Java mostly (not a big surprise really, but I don't compile any code before deployment). So, I Monday, I sent out a Twit to see if there was anyone with a good CF reference for ANT to do the simple stuff. I just want to copy some files from one location to another, so I can test it and then deploy. Marc Esher sent me over to http://www.mxunit.org/ where he had done a presentation on ANT and CF for CFUnited.

I downloaded the zip file, and found the reference file I was looking for. I worked on it a bit, and then forgot about it as phone calls and emails pored in... damn first day back from vacation.

So, later in the day, I was working along in CFB and accidentally hit CTRL-B, and I got a lovely console message telling me that my Build File wasn't right, the build.xml gained focus in CFB and the line with the error was selected... Was I ever shocked. So, I opened the sample again, and set back to work at it. I am impressed, with ANT, as well as its integration to CFB.

CFB popped up a content menu with ANT Tasks that I could choose from as well as descriptions of each - just like it does for CF tags, nice. So, I trundled along (it took about 5 minutes to get it working exactly the way I want it to) and finished off my first build script, then I hit CTRL-B again, but on purpose this time. ANT just ran along and boom, all the files I had wanted moved, were moved. The ones I didn't weren't. I would have to say I was a little excited.

So, I will be doing some more digging into the ANT docs, and Marc's preso and sample code, as I know that ANT can handle FTP'ing as well, so that is my next step. Oh, and the step after that? Well CFB as a plugin to FB4 and see if I can't get my Flex applications to build when I run the ANT script. That way I can run the routine and have the SWF compile and move with the CFCs needed to power it. I guess I need to figure out a way to have options in ANT, so that I can select if I want to run a 'Release build' or maybe just update the SVN... all from the same build file..

You know the more I think about how cool ANT is, the happier I am that the CFBuilder team included it! (I have never been one to continually add plugins to Eclipse, so this is just so easy... I like easy!)