Prashant Deva's blog

I just came across this JavaPosse podcast where they talk about Virtual Ant. They seem to be confused as to whether Virtual Ant runs only on Windows and can it run other operating systems too or not?

Here is the answer to that and some another queries I received in mail today –

• Does Virtual Ant run only on Windows? Can I run Virtual Ant on other operating systems, like linux or mac os x ?
  
  Virtual Ant is written completely in Java. (Yes, that's a swing ui you see in the video). So it can run on any operating system which can run Java. So yes, you can run it on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, even on Solaris if you want.
  
  
• Has the video been edited in any way to make Virtual Ant seem faster in any way?
  
  No. Virtual Ant really is that fast. If it wasn't so fast then creating those build scripts would be a huge pain, since you have to wait after each operation for it to complete.
  
  
• Does Virtual Ant only create build scripts? What about my existing build scripts? Can I open them in Virtual Ant too?
  
  Virtual Ant can both read and write Ant scripts. So you can open existing scripts, play them inside Virtual Ant, make changes and let the xml take care of itself. Part of the design goal of Virtual Ant is that you never ever have to deal with the xml. As an analogy think of word documents, you don't care about the xml that is generated when the document is saved, you just care about how the document actually looks. The same goes for Virtual Ant. That xml tab you see is there just for die hard xml fans or people who might be skeptical about using a GUI for everything. Once you start using Virtual Ant you will see yourself never needing to switch to it. And yes, if you do make any changes right in the xml, when you switch to the GUI tab you will see the changes have been applied to the GUI too.