Creation of jar via ANT vs Eclipse

Question

I was wondering if I could get any input on this: I am trying to create a jar that needs to be deployed on to radio head unit, I tried creating it by exporting it through Eclipse. But I was told the right way to do it was through Apache Ant. Why is that? (this is a LWUIT xlet coded in JAVA)

Answer 1

The biggest reasons to have a build script would be automation and reproducible. Your going to have a hard time having a continuous integration or build machine hitting the button in eclipse.
your ant build script will be put into source control which will prevent changes in your eclipse settings from causing changes in the ouput of your project. You're also going to have consistency when others build your code - especially with different IDEs.

I do like ant, but it's not 'the right way'. maven and gradle are both worth exploring.

Answer 2

Ant, or Maven maybe (building and managing the project). This would be preferred, because it could then be run on a Continuous Integration server like Jenkins.

Other than that it would be easier to use another IDE like Netbeans if you would want that.

Maven might need some plugin for what you are doing, so I'd check on that before considering it.