Ant and template based generation.

Ant, the java based build system, is pretty cool. I’ve been working on a template based project setup system.
Here is how.

• You’ll need a templates directory to keep all of the templates you want to generate
• Put together a ant build xml file that has a task to make the directory structure
• Now for the generation: use the Copy task to copy a template from the template directory to whatever file it should be in the project.
• Put a filterset subtask inside the copy. For each token, represented by default as @TOKENNAME@ (in the template files), use a filter task (with token=”TOKENNAME” value=”whatever you want”) to replace @TOKENNAME@ with whatever you want to have in there, such as class names, etc.

There you go.

Vim; build systems

Vim actually does work for flash development. The extension that makes it possible, along with all devel in vim, IMO, is the project plugin. The ant build system really helps, too; of course, it is difficult to remember that I need to rebuild the code every time I make a change, especially after using things like python and ruby. I’m going to really start investigating using build systems, most likely rake, for productivity stuff. Then, if I can tie that into vim, things will rock. Hard.