About AntForm/AntMenu

AntForm is a java tool designed to add interaction to Ant scripts through graphical forms. If you're new to Ant, start at the Ant site (see website: http://ant.apache.org/). Ant is used extensively used in the java world to automate system-level tasks, mostly (but not exclusively) as a software build system.

Why use AntForm?

Because automation can only be pushed so far until user input is required, the Ant developper will resort to prompting the user for certain property values at runtime. When the number of these properties increases and certain property values become dependant on others, it makes sense to divide the input into a flow of forms. AntForm enables you to do this.

In short, in keeping with the natural evolution of console-to-gui at the language level, AntForm ushers in the present-form paradigm where a read value view existed before.

The goal of the AntForm project is to provide a simple GUI that provides the following:

• Input forms for modifying properties
• Button-based menus that launch ant targets

What AntForm does

AntForm provides an Ant task (see usage) for setting property values through a Swing-based form. Properties are presented with a label on the left column and a widget field in the right column, one property per line. Each field component modifies an appointed Ant property when the form is submitted (i.e. the ok button clicked). Properties thus modified can be saved to a specified properties file and/or reused in other tasks. See screenshot

What AntMenu does

AntMenu provides an Ant task (see usage) that sets up a menu in a single vertical column for launching other ant targets. Each link to an Ant target is enabled by a button. See screenshot

License

AntForm is Open-source software under the LGPL license.