VPP

What is it?

VPP supports general file preprocessing based on the Velocity Template Engine and Ant by providing alternatives to the <copy> and <javac> . See the manual for a complete description.

A Quick Example

Use <vppcopy> anywhere you would useAnt's regular <copy> task to preprocess your files using the Velocity Template Language.
<vppcopy> supports all of <copy>'s parameters and nested parameters.
Access Ant's project properties within your templates by invoking $ant.propname.

<target name="vpp">
  <typedef resource="foundrylogic/vpp/typedef.properties" />
  <taskdef resource="foundrylogic/vpp/taskdef.properties" />
  
  <vppcopy todir="output" overwrite="true">
    <fileset dir="src" includes="*.html.vpp" />
    <mapper type="glob" from="*.html.vpp" to="*.html" />
  </vppcopy>
</target>

Why?

As of VPP's initial publication, there were no cross-platform, Ant-based preprocessing tools available. With Ant 1.5.x, FilterChains were introduced that allowed some basic token substitution, but none of the available implementations provide the raw horsepower of a macro language, such as VTL.

Download and Installation

Get the latest and greatest release of VPP from http://sourceforge.net/projects/vpp .
Assuming that you have already installed and configured Ant correctly, you may deploy VPP by simply executing ant deploy from the location where you installed VPP.
Alternatively, you may also copy the jar files located in the lib subdirectory to your Ant installation ($ANT_HOME/lib).

Documentation and Examples

See build.xml for an example of VPP usage.
See HelloWorld.html.vpp for an example template.
See the FAQ .
See the list of changes .

Getting Help

Please search the vpp-user mailing list archive and/or subscribe here .

Licensing

This software is licensed under BSD, the terms of which you may find here .

References

Credits

Daniel Savarese for the initial inspiration.
All the folks at Apache and especially those responsible for Ant and Velocity . Keep up the great work!
Bill Burton for the idea of implementing this library based on Ant 's FilterReader/FilterChain approach.
All the folks at Sourceforge for providing open source hosting: