Online Programming Thoughts

Getting FTP to Work with Ant in Eclipse

The one thing that I hate about Java is it seems you have to download a hundred packages to get something to work sometimes. It always takes forever to figure out what packages you need and where to get them. If I need something for .NET I usually can find it at Microsoft.Com. On the other hand the flexability and open source aspects of Java help mitigate these small nuscences. So today I need to find some ANT libraries to allow me to FTP through Eclipse. I also had to figure out where to put them. I found a nice article that was very helpful at Devnull.
Here is is basically verbatim:

I never seem to remember what I need to install to get the optional task in Ant working when it's time to blow away Eclipse and start a fresh install. Here is the basic information you need to get it working:

For Ant 1.5, you will need to download NetComponents.jar

For Ant 1.6 (Ant 1.6.2 is current in the Eclipse 3.1 Milestone as of this writing), you will need commons-net.jar and the Jakarta ORO JAR file.

Grab the applicable files above and put them in your $ECLIPSEHOME/plugins/org.apache.ant_$CURRENTVERSION/lib folder. You'll then need to add the file(s) you copied to this directory to the Ant classpath which you can do by going to Window > Preferences, traverse down the tree on the left to Ant > Runtime, and use the dialog box which appears to add them. I usually use the "Add External JAR's" option myself. Click "OK" when done,and then you should be good to go. You may however need to restart Eclipse.

posted by SirFWALGMan @ 11:23 AM