The open source project ant4eclipse has now been upgraded to version 0.4.0. ant4eclipse provides a set of Ant tasks that can be used to integrate Eclipse configurations into Ant buildscripts. Version 0.4.0 comes with Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) support and also helps in building Eclipse plug-ins.

The aim of the ant4eclipse project is to avoid the redundancy of Eclipse and Ant configurations. More precisely, it consists of Ant tasks that are able to read and work with some of Eclipse’s configuration files. With these tasks you will be able to:

• Setup classpaths as defined in Eclipse’s .classpath-file
• Checkout complete workspaces as it's possible with the Team Project Set feature of eclipse
• Run your Java applications as you have defined them in an Eclipse Launch Configuration.

With all these tasks you will be able to create a complete automatic build system that starts with checking out all required projects from CVS, builds all projects in the correct order with classpath settings as specified in Eclipse, and to launch your applications as they are specified in Eclipse. If a configuration in Eclipse is changed, those changes are immediately visible to your buildfiles - without changing one line of code.