Developing Ant tasks and types within Eclipse
The following guidelines should be followed when developing and debugging Ant
tasks and types within Eclipse. These requirements stem from the fact that Ant
tasks and types must be loaded by the Ant classloader, rather than a plug-in
classloader, when Ant is run in the same VM as Eclipse. To avoid having the
Ant tasks and types loaded by a plug-in classloader, the tasks and types need
to be stored in a location that is not visible to any plug-in classloader. Also
see Contributing tasks and types.
- Contributed Ant tasks or types should be defined in their own source folder
within a plug-in (i.e. separate from the source folders containing regular
plug-in classes)
- Each source folder containing the Ant tasks and types should have its own
output location that does not overlap with the output location of the regular
plug-in classes.
- When testing/debugging the new Ant tasks or types, the project contributing
the Ant tasks or types must be configured to exclude the output folders
containing the Ant tasks and types. Use the Properties dialog for the project to
correctly configure the Self-Hosting configuration by removing the Ant output
directories from the plug-ins classpath.
