If you have ever developed for the BlackBerry platform in any serious capacity you have probably used or at least heard of ANT scripts. ANT (Another Neat Tool) is a nice Java utility from Apache that helps you automate the building of applications from source code. While we can always wish that RIM would include one click build, sign, deploy buttons in all of their tools that is usually not the case. For example, as we mentioned in the BlackBerry Developer School of Hard Knocks article the process sometimes involves scratching your left ear with your right hand.
These ANT scripts help developers automate the 3-4 commands RIM requires to build an app and deploy it on devices like the PlayBook. Pnewhook was kind enough to share his sample ANT Build script for PlayBook WebWorks apps at this link in the official BlackBerry Forums.
I really hope RIM manages to make this whole process into one button but for now I am working on customizing the script a bit to strip out .DS_Store files which invalidate the build on my Mac.
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