Ant's cool morale booster: splash task
Spotted the use of the <splash> task in the Hibernate build.xml today (via BPH). So of course I had to add it to Clover's build file. You can see the results in the following screenshot. The <splash> task shows an image and a progress bar while the build is executing (the image can even be an animated .gif).
This is cool and fun, but "cool" is not the only reason why I added it to a production build file. In a previous life, I was working on a huge GUI client in Java (in pre-1.0 Swing!). We would release to system test quite often (twice a month?), and for each release we would come up with a humorous and on-topic splash screen for the application. It was a good release valve, and was good for morale.
I'm sure that my co-workers will now replace the build splash image from time to time.
You'll do a cvs -q update -dP and then an ant build and all
of a sudden some humorous picture will pop up. Nothing like a good chuckle between coders.
To put this into your own build, you will need something like the following. But things to note about this Ant snipet:
- We use an "-init" target that most "core" targets depend on, but you'll get the idea.
- We prefix any target with "-" if that target shouldn't really be called from the command line (this idiom is documented in the Ant manual)
- When doing a "production" build using the "prod.build" target, I turn the splash screen off.
<target name="-splash" unless="nosplash">
<property name="splash.dir" location="."/>
<splash imageurl="file:${splash.dir}/fun/buildsplash.gif" />
</target>
<target name="-nosplash">
<property name="nosplash" value="foo"/>
</target>
<target name="-init" depends="-splash">
<tstamp>
<format property="build.date" pattern="MMMM dd yyyy"/>
</tstamp>
...
</target>
<target name="prod.build" depends="-nosplash, -init, ..."/>
The <splash> task should be used to maximum effect in combination with the <sound> task.