Monday, March 9th, 2009
JavaScript build process using Ant
Category: Utility
The preprocessor lives in the open source js build tools project and allows you to do C-style ifdef type work:
JAVASCRIPT:
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// #ifdef somedefine
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someLogic();
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// #endif
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someOtherLogic();
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You can tie this together with Ant by using some custom rules to process and then compress:
XML:
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<preprocess infile="file.js" outfile="file.processed.js" defines="somedefine,someotherdefine" />
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<yuicompress infile="file.js" outfile="file.min.js" />
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2.9 rating from 17 votes
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.