B.C.'s Geek Grrl Page

When I have nothing better to do with my time, I play around with Java.

Ant Tasks

Ant is a build tool for Java -- like make and a number of other build tools. Ant was developed by the Apache Group. One of the key concepts in Ant is the idea of a task.

My XHTMLify task uses the JTidy component to convert HTML into XHTML. Once in XHTML form, you can apply XSL style sheets (using, say, Ant's Style task) to convert make the document more attractive.

To use it, first you need to define the task in a build.xml file:

<target name="init">
  <taskdef name="xhtmlify" classname="org.bcholmes.ant.taskdefs.XHTMLify"/>
</target>

then define a particular target:

<target name="xhtml" depends="init">
  <xhtmlify srcdir="." destdir="." proprietary="true" verbose="false">
    <include name="*.html"/>
  </xhtmlify>
</target>

Copyright © 2000 by B.C. Holmes. Last updated: October 22nd, 2000