ANT with JavaScript

Recently at work we had the need to build an application that could both be run over the network and on the local filesystem. Well, this doesn’t work with the Flash security setup as SWF files can only be run on one or the other. Like many other developers, we use ANT to build our projects and would like setting this property to be built into our build files. The SDK compiler has a nice property called “use-network” which can easily be set to true or false depending on your need which solves this situation nicely. The problem we ran into was with ANT and dealing with IF/ELSE target statements.

What we wanted to do was to use the same build SWF targets but for both situations without having to modify our process. Our solution was a nifty trick that used JavaScript inside ANT. I had never seen this technique before but some searching for a solution led us in this direction.

As you can see below, we have two initial targets, one which builds for local file system and one which builds for network use. We can then run either target first, which sets a property in our ANT file and then run our normal SWF build targets as normal, with this property set to the “use-network” property. Really looking forward to exploring some more complexities with JavaScript integration (as well as other languages from what I’ve read).

<target name="compile_local">
	<script language="javascript">
	<![CDATA[
		presenter.setProperty( "use-network", "false" );
	]]>
	</script>
</target>
<target name="compile_network">
	<script language="javascript">
	<![CDATA[
		presenter.setProperty( "use-network", "true" );
	]]>
	</script>
</target>