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Not the same Ant GUI app question

 
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Greetings all,
I know there are other topics in this forum with GUI in the subject(I already checked) but this is a different question. I'm curious if anyone knows if there is an app out there to set up and run ant buildfiles for deployment from a GUI. Not within an IDE, mind you, but just to configure and run a script, i.e. setting properties in a skeletal file and execute the file to deploy an app. Here is why I ask:
I'm working on a branded ASP webapp(Application Service Provider, not the evil-empire ASP-type ) Right now we have 14 active "partners" under the app, which are basically just directories under the WAR, but that number is rapidly growing, and I'm finding myself writing very similar(and lengthy) ant scripts over and over to deploy new partners and to add enhancements to existing ones. They aren't exact, but they are close, so I find myself changing properties mostly, destination directories and such, but sometimes other things as well. I'm also not responsible for deploying the code to our production box, but I'm the one who has to write the scripts for my project lead to execute.
I had an idea to build a simple GUI app that would parse the buildfile and prompt for properties and such, so that my project lead could handle doing this on his own and stop bothering me to write the scripts, at least for the mundane stuff. Basically put together a few skeleton scripts that just need properties set or maybe some flags that will handle some alternate taks for some flexibility. I thought about using property files, but then I'll have the same problem changing property files that I have with the scripts.
I'm fairly new to ant, so a couple things occurred to me when I came up with this idea:
1-Is this overkill? Am I missing something really basic in ant that does this type of thing already? And...
2-If this was a really good idea someone probably already came up with it so I thought I'd check to see if something like that exists (although I did a fairly lengthy google search and didn't come up with anything).
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
E
 
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Ant's property task has a nice feature that allows you to set properties based on a property file.
<property file="build.properties" />
build.properties should contain lines of the form "name=value", just like a normal properties file. All those properties will then be available to your Ant script.
What you can do is remove all the properties that will change for different customers and stick them in properties files specific to those customers. You could even get slick, and have:
<property file="${customer}.properties" />
Then you could run Ant as:
ant -Dcustomer=peculate_ltd
 
Eric Fletcher
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Greg,
Thanks for the reply. That's pretty slick, I'll give that a shot on the next deployment.
E
[ April 18, 2003: Message edited by: Eric Fletcher ]
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