Antenna Support
Generating Antenna Build Files
About Antenna
Antenna (http://antenna.sourceforge.net) is an Ant extension. Antenna provides a set of Ant tasks suitable for developing wireless Java applications targeted at the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP). With Antenna, you can compile, preverify, package, obfuscate, and run your MIDP applications (aka MIDlets), manipulate Java Application Descriptor (JAD) files, as well as convert JAR files to PRC files designed to run on the MIDP for PalmOS implementations from Sun and IBM. Thus, Antenna does many of the things in the Ant world that EclipseME does in the IDE world.
Beginning with version 0.6.0, EclipseME has the ability to automatically generate and update a set of Antenna-compatible build files. This allows EclipseME users to easily publish Antenna build files for non-Eclipse users, or to use Antenna in conjunction with EclipseME to perform operations, such as PRC conversion, that EclipseME does not provide. It also allows EclipseME projects to be included in automated builds of larger projects.
Configuration
Before you can use EclipseME's Antenna generation feature, you must first provide EclipseME with the location of the Antenna JAR file. This configuration item is part of the Basic Preferences page.
Generating Antenna Build Files
In order to actually generate the Antenna Build Files, all you need to do is to right-click on the project in the Package Explorer window, select the J2ME item from the context menu and then select Export Antenna Build Files from the submenu.
Performing this operation the first time will result in three files being added to your project:
build.xml
This is the standard Ant build file. If your project does not already have a build.xml file one will be added.
eclipseme-build.xml
This is the generated Antenna build file.
eclipseme-build.properties
This file contains properties that eclipseme-build.xml imports.
Ant support is built into Eclipse, and Antenna build support is included in EclipseME, so you can execute the Antenna build directly by right-clicking on build.xml and selecting Run / Ant Build or selecting External Tools from the main Run menu.
Customizing the Antenna Build
Although the automatically-generated build.xml and eclipseme-build.xml file contains most of the common operations you would typically want to perform with Antenna, the designers of EclipseME obviously can't anticipate all possible situations. As such, EclipseME's automatic generation process includes the ability to customize the generated build files.
Do not edit the eclipseme-build.xml and eclipseme-build.properties files.
These files are automatically re-generated if and when you repeat the export process, and so any changes you make will be overwritten. In addition, the format and organization of the eclipseme-build.xml file is subject to change.
If you want to add properties to those automatically generated into eclipseme-build.properties file, or if you need to override the automatically-generated properties, you can do so by creating a file named user-build.properties in your workspace. The contents of this file, if it is present, will override the properties EclipseME would normally generate.
If you want to add tasks to your build, add them to the build.xml file. If you look at the generated files, you will see that the build.xml file references the eclipseme-build.xml file using ant tasks.
Note that the default build.xml assumes that you are packaging your MIDlet suite using obfuscation. If you are not using obfuscation, you will want to modify the build.xml file appropriately. To do this, locate the line in the build.xml that reads:
<target name="deployedSuite" depends="deployable" />
and change it to read:
<target name="deployedSuite" depends="jar" />
