ANT: ways to include libraries and license issues
- by Eric Tobias
I have been trying to use Ant to compile and ready a project for distribution. I have encountered several problems along the way that I have been finally able to solve but the solution leaves me very unsatisfied. First, let me explain the set-up of the project and its dependencies.
I have a project, lets call it Primary which depends on a couple of libraries such as the fantastic Guava. It also depends on another project of mine, lets call it Secondary. The Secondary project also features some dependencies, for example, JDOM2. I have referenced the Jar I build with Ant in Primary.
Let me give you the interesting bits of the build.xml so you can get a picture of what I am doing:
<project name="Primary" default="all" basedir=".">
<property name='build' location='dist' />
<property name='application.version' value='1.0'/>
<property name='application.name' value='Primary'/>
<property name='distribution' value='${application.name}-${application.version}'/>
<path id='compile.classpath'>
<fileset dir='libs'>
<include name='*.jar'/>
</fileset>
</path>
<target name='compile' description='Compile source files.'>
<javac includeantruntime="false" srcdir="src" destdir="bin">
<classpath refid='compile.classpath'/>
</javac>
<target>
<target name='jar' description='Create a jar file for distribution.' depends="compile">
<jar destfile='${build}/${distribution}.jar'>
<fileset dir="bin"/>
<zipgroupfileset dir="libs" includes="*.jar"/>
</jar>
</target>
The Secodnary project's build.xml is nearly identical except that it features a manifest as it needs to run:
<target name='jar' description='Create a jar file for distribution.' depends="compile">
<jar destfile='${dist}/${distribution}.jar' basedir="${build}" >
<fileset dir="${build}"/>
<zipgroupfileset dir="libs" includes="*.jar"/>
<manifest>
<attribute name="Main-Class" value="lu.tudor.ssi.kiss.climate.ClimateChange"/>
</manifest>
</jar>
</target>
After I got it working, trying for many hours to not include that dependencies as class files but as Jars, I don't have the time or insight to go back and try to figure out what I did wrong. Furthermore, I believe that including these libraries as class files is bad practice as it could give rise to licensing issues while not packaging them and merely including them in a directory along the build Jar would most probably not (And if it would you could choose not to distribute them yourself).
I think my inability to correctly assemble the class path, I always received NoClassDefFoundError for classes or libraries in the Primary project when launching Second's Jar, is that I am not very experienced with Ant. Would I require to specify a class path for both projects? Specifying the class path as . should have allowed me to simply add all dependencies to the same folder as Secondary's Jar, should it not?
