Ant and gui components ( Groovy Swing )

What to do if you want to extend ant scripts functionality with some gui features i.e. wizards for the beginners etc. ? I was facing the same problem - I needed some quick and nice solution so my choice was Swing and Java, well not directly - it's Groovy and SwingBuilder. It's even easier :)

Two things, we need to create our component in Groovy and integrate it with Ant's environment.

Component's key parts and structure ( Groovy ):

Some explanations:

We need to add the code preventing from the thread termination due to Ant policies. Ant executes target and ends its work by terminating its thread and all sub threads.

isAlive - flag which indicates whether component is alive or not

class Configurator extends SoftwareBuild {

boolean isAlive = true
SwingBuilder swing = null
JFrame frame = null

public void init(AntBuilder providerAntBuilder) {
  if (swing == null || frame == null) {
      swing = new SwingBuilder()
      frame = swing.frame()
  }
  super.init(providerAntBuilder);
}


public void start() {

  frame = swing.frame(title: 'Vine configurator', size: [800, 600],
          defaultCloseOperation: WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE,
          addShutdownHook { isAlive = false}) {
        
  }

  frame.show()

  //To keep this tread alive - prevents from being closed by ant
  while (isAlive) {
      sleep(1000)
  }

}

Invocation of our component from the ant script level ( Ant's build.xml ):

<target name="gui" description="Displays gui for Vine configuration">
  <groovy>

      ant.gui.Configurator configurator = new ant.gui.Configurator()
      try {
// from the level of Ant's build script we're passing a reference to the ant environment
      configurator.init(ant)
// displaying our swing component
      configurator.start()
      } catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace()
      }

  </groovy>
</target>

Ant the effect of this work is ( based on the example from the Vine Toolkit ):