Have you ever used your own custom ant task in the eclipse environment. Well – I have written some ant tasks and they are being used by all developers in our company. But there’s the annoying thing that I always have to add the libs containing my tasks to the classpath. Nothing easier than this you might be thinking. Add it to ants classpath in the eclipse preferences. This works on my machine but what about all other developers? What about updates to the libs?

I guess I found the perfect solution for this problem. Write an eclipse plug-in that adds all libraries to ants classpath using the extension point of the ant plug-in and put the plug-in on an eclipse site so all developers can get it automatically.

That’s easy to say but how? Lets get our hands dirty…

Java ant, eclipse, eclipse-plugin, Java, task, update-site