Blackberry Ant Tools is a collection of ant tasks for building blackberry applications. It's designed to be as simple as possible yet powerful enough to completely replace the RIM JDE. However a copy of the JDE must be installed for the rapc and signature tool jar files.
Blackberry Ant Tools use the executable jar files to run the rapc compiler and signature tool. There is nothing windows specific about these ant tasks. If you have a copy of the JDE and the J2ME preverify command somewhere in the path, the rapc compiler works fine on other operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, etc).
If you don't like something, provide feedback and we'll take a look. Or better yet, get the source and send in a patch!
The following new features have been added:
* <alx> generate .alx file and copy .cod files
* <jadtool> update .jad file and extract sibling .cod files
In addition, the rapc task has been updated to fix an issue on Windows when compiling projects with many files or very long path names.
From now on, version numbering will follow the standard x.y.z nomenclature. Since bb-ant-tools has been in use by myself and many others for quite some time now, I think it's fitting that the project be given the 1.0.0 status. (0 comments)
A few weeks back RIM held their first ever developer conference. One of the presentations went over techniques for managing code bases that must target legacy OS versions. In this presentation RIM revealed the presence of a simple preprocessor in the rapc compiler.
Release 0.8 exposes said preprocessor and provides several new attributes in the rapc ant task for slightly increased control on compiler output and behavior.
See the documentation section for details on how to use the preprocessor and a list of new boolean attributes. (0 comments)
I've had so many people ask for help when the rapc task bails because it can't find the preverify program that I decided to update the rapc task to automagically add the JDE's bin directory (temporarily) to the systems PATH environment variable.
The latest build (version 0.7) has this update.
However, you MUST have the Java JDK's bin directory in your systems PATH variable otherwise rapc won't be able to find the javac command.
I will update the website with instructions on setting up your environment shortly. (0 comments)
With the release of JDE 4.3 came a few updates to the signature tool. You can (finally!) specify your password on the command line so that you don't have to re-type the damn thing ever time you sign a cod file.
I've update the sigtool task to support this. See the documentation for details.
Oh, and it appears as though the signature tool still doesn't work in *nix (write once, run anywhere my ass). Bummer... (0 comments)
The fifth release of blackberry ant tools has been posted in the downloads section. This release has a new feature for setting alternate entry points for CLDC applications.
See the http://bb-ant-tools.sourceforge.net/#docs for more information. (0 comments)
With certain combinations of the RIM JDE and the Sun JRE, the rapc compiler will complain it can't find certain classes in the rim api.
To remedy this, I added an optional property to the rapc task for setting the home directory of the jvm to use for launching the rapc command. Version 0.4 incorporates this feature. (0 comments)
There was a mistake in the project build script which caused empty directories for source code and config files to be added to the source package when creating release packages.
I've fixed the build script and updated the source package in the latest release on SourceForge. The version number has not change. (0 comments)
The third release of blackberry ant tools has been posted in the downloads section. This release contains a couple of critical bug fixes:
- Fixed module flag generation for system modules and applications that run on startup.
- Added info message to rapc task to display the number of files compiled.
The version number has been dropped from the jar file name. This should make it less of a hassle when installing new versions into the ant lib directory (no need to delete previous version, just overwrite). (0 comments)
I've posted version 0.2 of bb ant tools. It contains the following bug fixes and enhancements:
- Fixed bug in rapc task that could cause library projects to be incorrectly compiled as cldc applications.
- Added warning message if size of cod file was the same before and after launching SignatureTool.jar.
- Added short sleep before creating "file signed" indicator which results in more reliable checking for already signed cod files. (0 comments)
bb-ant-tools 0.1 has been release.
bb-ant-tools is a set of ant tasks to make development for the blackberry easier for developers that prefer to use ant for building their projects.
Please try it out and give feedback. (0 comments)