Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Growl Notifications for Ant


Most of our code is written in Java here at Bizo. This means we heavily rely on Ant for building, testing and packaging our applications.

Sometimes I found myself watching the scrolling terminal waiting for a build to complete. Other times, I left the terminal to go off and do some other task while the build was happening, only to realize some minutes later that my build was probably done. What I wanted was a way for Ant to notify me when the build was complete so I didn't have to stare at a terminal or forget about the build. What I wanted was Growl notifications from Ant!

If you don't know what Growl is you can read about it here. Its basically a notification API for Mac OSX and very widely supported and used (other applications that use it include Adium and Quicksilver for example). (BTW - All Bizo developers get Macs...)

Doing a little searching turned up this blog post. It was pretty easy to get this task integrated with our build system... And now, growl tells me when my build is done!