Recipe 7.5 Using Your Own Version of Ant

7.5.1 Problem

A newer version of Ant is out, one more recent than that which comes with Eclipse, and you want to upgrade. Or you just want to use a version of Ant that's different from the one that comes with Eclipse.

7.5.2 Solution

Select Window Preferences Ant Runtime Classpath, and point to the new Ant .jar files.

7.5.3 Discussion

To set the version of Ant (you can get Ant directly from Apache at http://ant.apache.org), just select Window Preferences Ant Runtime Classpath. All you have to do is to point to the new Ant .jar files ant.jar and optional.jar, shown in Figure 7-12.

The Ant .jar files ant.jar and optional.jar are specific to Ant 1.5.3, which is the version of Ant that comes with Eclipse 2.1.2. Different versions of Ant might have different names for these files, or include more .jar files.

Figure 7-12. Using your own version of Ant

7.5.3.1 Eclipse 3.0

The current build of Eclipse 3.0 comes with Ant 1.6.0 and has classpath entries for 29 Ant .jar files—not just the two of earlier versions. Also, by default, now you are warned if you attempt to execute Ant without a tools.jar file on the Ant classpath; you are warned when Ant is configured to run in the same JVM as Eclipse (which you might not want in case you're targeting your build at another version of Java); and you are warned when the Xerces packages (which no longer are needed) are included in the Ant classpath.

7.5.4 See Also

Recipe 7.10 on using Ant as an external tool.