Increasing Memory for Ant

I had an issue today with the javac Ant task running out of memory when compiling a project (~800 files) under Java 6 on the Mac. It was fine under the default Java 5 compiler on the Mac, and it was fine under Java 6 on the PC. Initially, I set memoryMaximumSize on the javac task, which also required that fork be set.
This was OK, but since this was specific to compiling on the Mac, I figured the solution should be specific to my environment on the Mac. After looking at the source of the ant script, I realized that the ANT_OPTS variable could be set to contain an option (-Xmx512m) for the JRE running Ant, and that ANT_OPTS could be set from either ~/.antrc or ~/.ant/ant.conf. So, I created ~/.antrc with one line: ANT_OPTS=-DXmx512m.
(Update: oops, that should be ANT_OPTS=-Xmx512m)
And it worked perfectly, of course - so simple it had to work.

enjoy,
Charles.

Ant, JavaDoc, and CreateProcess error=87

I've been developing an Ant build file for a large-ish base of existing code. I've been using my Mac as the primary devleopment platform, but the ultimate target (for the other developers) is Windows. My task to build the javadocs runs fine on OS X, but the first time I rant it on Windows, I got the following:

c:\demo\build.xml:180: Javadoc failed: java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0\bin\javadoc.exe": CreateProcess error=87, The parameter is incorrect

After about 10 minutes of Googling, I found a/the simple solution: add the useexternalfile attribute to the javadoc task in Ant. Voila , back in business, on the PC at least, and it didn't seem to break the build on the Mac.

Charles.

Data Driven, my eye!

I've started using the WebTest web testing framework. Mostly, it's pretty cool. However, I have a bone to pick with screencast demonstrating the dataDriven task.

1. There's a "slide" that says "Do you know the dataDriven Ant task?" I know of no such standard Ant task. It turns out that it's specific to WebTest. Not really clear.
   
2. They show no configuration steps to use it, implying that it works out-of-the-box. I don't know if my environment is wacked (I installed from the developer build, as they suggested), but I had to add an Ant taskdef referring to com.canoo.ant.task.PropertyTableTask, and I only found that by looking in the source.
3. The screencast shows running ant at the command line, which is how I've been running my tests, but I had to run their webtest script instead. Again, maybe my installation is wacked.
4. I really wish it could handle data in a TSV/CSV/text file, since I don't have Excel installed on the machine where I'm running these tests, but it only seems to accept an xls file.
5. Just to add insult to injury, Google Spreadsheet (which I'm using to generate the data file) seems to append a bunch of empty lines to my spreadsheet, which causes the dataDriven task to repeat the last line 90-odd times.
   

Grrr,
Charles - aka Cranky Pants.

Update:
OK, so it sucked to be me, but not any more. I figured out my various issues with the dataDriven task. It turns out that the screencast (clearly) shows them developing in the tests directory of a WebTest project. I missed that and tried to use dataDriven in the top-level build.xml in a target that didn't declare wt.defineTasks as a dependency. Guess what wt.defineTask does - yup, it does the taskdef.
I coupled that breakthrough with breaking down and using Excel to create the xls file (instead of exporting from Google) and viola - I'm livin' large and no longer cranky.

enjoy,
Charles.

P.S. Apologies to Cheech and Chong.