Did you ever wonder why there is no Ant support in your Eclipse installation?

If you are working with Eclipse as your standard IDE for PHP Projects you will probably use the PDT Eclipse environment which doesn’t include much of the Java project tools. Ant is one of the very handy ones.

What is Ant?

With Ant you can write simple and as well sophisticated batch jobs for compiling and deploying your code or any other task you could think of. For an example, I’m using Ant to compress and obfuscate my Javascript and CSS files.

How does it work?

Tasks you would like to be processed with Ant you put in a build.xml file.
Here is a simple example:

 
     Files foo.txt and bar.txt are present.
 

 
     
         
             
             
         
     
 

To learn how to write your own build files checkout the Ant Manual.

Activating Ant in Eclipse

1. In Eclipse go to Help -> Software Updates -> Available Software
2. Select Java Development Tools and install it
3. Restart Eclipse

Now you should be able to see Ant in your Eclipse Preferences and when you right-click on a build.xml file in your project you can run it via Run As -> Ant Build.

I found today a superb resource for Cheat Sheets (also known as reference cards) on DZone.

Whenever I find a cheat sheet in a book store I need to buy it.  Looking up information on the Internet is way faster but sometimes you don’t have a connection and these short e-books can be of good help.

Here is a short list of Cheat Sheets I found on DZone:

• Essential MySQL
• Core ASP.Net
• Core CSS: Part III
• Essential Ruby
• Core Java
• PHP
• Struts
• C#
• JQuery Selectors
• Design Patterns
• Spring Configuration
• Getting Started with Eclipse

You will find on http://refcardz.dzone.com more the 50 of these sheets.