new R package : ant

The ant package has been released to CRAN yesterday. As discussed in previous posts in this blog (here and here), the ant R package provides an R-aware version of the ant build tool from the apache project.

The package contains an R script that can be used to invoke ant with enough plumbing so that it can use R code during the build process. Calling the script is further simplified with the ant function included in the package.

$ Rscript -e "ant::ant()"

The simplest way to take advantage of this package is to add it to the Depends list of yours, include a java source tree somewhere in your package tree (most likely somewhere in the inst tree) with a build.xml file, and include a configure and configure.win script at the root of the package that contains something like this:

#!/bin/sh

cd inst/java_src
"${R_HOME}/bin/Rscript" -e "ant::ant()"
cd ../..

This will be further illustrated with the demo package helloJavaWorld in future posts