Automating ActionScript Projects with Eclipse and Ant

Emailing the Client/Support Desk

Why is emailing useful? We already discussed this a little bit at the beginning of this chapter. Let’s say you have three responsibilities: deploying via the service desk, updating your project manager about what is left to do, and keeping your team informed about the project’s status.

You have several different options available when you send an email: plain text, different encodings, with or without attachments, and more. Ant can handle all of the above, and we will go through each of your aforementioned responsibilities to show you how.

We can, of course, send an email to three people every time we do a deployment. But what if you deploy every hour, or even every half hour? Doing this task by hand—over and over again—is tedious, to say the least!

So we won’t. Let’s hand over this task to Ant and let it deal with it. Much easier, right?

What do we need?

• One email with the deployment assets to the service desk

• One email to the project manager

• One email to your team

Let’s take a step back. Normally when you write code, you place your //TODO and //FIXME notes all over the place, mostly for your own reference and so your team knows what is happening and what still needs to be fixed.

Now wouldn’t it be nice if we could have an Ant task to read through all our class files, get our //TODOs, place them in a file, and mail them to you, or to someone else so that person could see what was left to do?

Luckily for us, a developer, Alex Collins from England, has already ...