Ant task to generate a deployment structure for a webstart enabled application.

An example:

<project xmlns:p="antlib:de.perdian.ant.webstart">
  ...
  <target name="create-webstart">
    <taskdef uri="antlib:de.perdian.ant.webstart" classpath="/path/to/webstart.jar" />
    <p:jnlp destfile="${build.target.directory}/webstart/test.jnlp">
      <information>
        <title>aTitle</title>
        <vendor>aVendor</vendor>
        <offlineallowed />
        <description>Short Description</description>
      </information>
      <resources>
        <path>
          <fileset dir="${build.target.directory}/webstart/libs/">
          </fileset>
        </path>
      </resources>
      <security>
        <allpermissions />
      </security>
      <applicationdesc mainclass="de.perdian.google.api.apps.impl.driveclient.DriveClientLauncher" />
    </p:jnlp>
  </target>
  ...
</project>

All in all, the declaration of the target JNLP file in the Ant task ist almost identical to the actual JNLP file, as it is defined in the specification (http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/javaws/developersguide/syntax.html). The main exception being, that wherever slashes in the specification are allowed, (for example within the offline-allowed element, there are no slashed allowed for the ant task (which means the tag is to be added as offlineallowed).

Additionally, to all the standard JNLP elements, the resources elements supports adding a path child, as described in the example above. The existence of such a child means, that the task will analyze the contents of the path and will add a jar child element to the resources parent element for each of the entries found in the path. This allows for a dynamic way to add required resources, without actually having to declare them over and over again. The path's to the resource files (usually JARs) will be relative to the location of the JNLP file itself (as defined in the destfile attribute of the main task element).

The ant-webstart tasks requires Java SE 6 or higher.

If you want to build the application yourself, all you have to do once you've cloned the Git repository is to call the Ant buildscript:

cd /whereever/your/project/is
ant distribute-lib

Please note, that since the project uses Apache Ivy as dependency management system, your Ant installation must also have the Apache Ivy JAR-File in it's classpath. For further information about Apache Ivy see: https://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/latest-milestone/install.html

Once the build is completed, the JAR file containing the tasks can be found in the distribution/lib subdirectory.