Finite Improbability

For the most part yesterday (and part of this morning) was spent working on the build environment. Up until this point I’ve been compiling my program “by hand” with a command line argument run in the background by Emacs. This worked well enough, but adding three new files to the compile list was enough for me to decide it was time to address building the project in a better way.

So, I got to spend the day playing around with Apache Ant. Scala has a bunch of ant task definitions that took forever for me to figure out how to import. From there getting the whole thing to compile worked well enough, but figuring out how to tell ant how to run the program was a pain. I somehow managed to segue into building distribution jars, where I discovered the brain-dead inability to pack a jar within a jar.

Anyways, at the end of the day I have a build file that compiles the project and can run it directly or package it into it’s own .jar file and dump that into a dist folder. Eventually I’ll have to get around to solving the webstart issue, but for now I’m happy with what I’ve got.

The little bit of actual coding work was some class reorganization. I cleaned up most of the mess in my classes left behind from all of the testing I’ve been doing. I actually have code that is intended to represent the ants, ant hill, and food objects sitting in the source tree.