ant4eclipse 0.5 RC1

ant4eclipse project provides a set of Ant tasks that can be used to integrate Eclipse configurations into Ant buildscripts
We all know this situation: the developers of a team are using the Eclipse IDE to code their apps, to compile their apps, to version, to deploy, and to run their apps. No problems so far. But as soon as you want to set up something like a continuous build system which runs outside of Eclipse you also need a build process that is independent of Eclipse. Usually you will use Ant and some other tools to define your automatic build process. Fine. But unfortunately Ant cannot use any of Eclipses configurations, such as classpathes, launcher or team project sets. Although everything has been nicely configured already inside the IDE, it has to be redone in those external Ant build files. And even worse: it has to be reconfigured each time a developer makes changes in Eclipse. As always with redundant data, the challange is to keep Eclipse and Ant configurations in sync. But how about avoiding redundancy in the first place? This is where ant4eclipse comes into play...
The aim of the ant4eclipse project is to avoid (or at least: to reduce) the redundancy of Eclipse and Ant configurations. More precisly: it consists of Ant tasks that are able to read and work with some of Eclipses configuration files. With these tasks youre able to:
- Setup classpathes as defined in Eclipse .classpath-file
- checkout complete workspaces as its possible with the Team Project Set feature of eclipse
- run your Java applications as you have defined them in an Eclipse Launch Configuration
With all these tasks youre able to create a complete automatic build system that starts with checking out all required projects from CVS, builds all projects in the correct order with classpath settings as specified in Eclipse, and to launch your applications as they are specified in Eclipse. And the best of it: if you or someone else changes a configuration in Eclipse, those changes are immediately visible to your buildfiles - without changing one line of code!