Monday, March 9th, 2009
JavaScript build process using Ant
Johan "Spocke" Sörlin of Moxiecode has written an article on a build process that uses Ant to munge JavaScript.
The preprocessor lives in the open source js build tools project and allows you to do C-style ifdef type work:
JAVASCRIPT:
// #ifdef somedefine
someLogic();
// #endif
someOtherLogic();
You can tie this together with Ant by using some custom rules to process and then compress:
XML:
<preprocess infile="file.js" outfile="file.processed.js" defines="somedefine,someotherdefine" />
<yuicompress infile="file.js" outfile="file.min.js" />
I guess this would be a good idea, as long as the build process is very simple. Ant gets really hairy when you try to apply conditional logic — for this reason I’m looking at Buildr (http://buildr.apache.org/) instead — because XML is useful only as a declarative, not an imperative, language.