Let It Build!

Download build 430

• Now you can drag-and-drop your libraries right to jar files: Contents of your IDEA libraries will be gracefully packaged to that jar file
• UI was given a little facelft, we made a big use of collapsible blocks. That turned out to be pretty elegant way to unclutter user interface: you can just hide panels that you do not want to see:

The next "big thing" is gonna be the "build flow" feature and our own windows launcher. Both are under active development now, so keep in touch.

We are actually very close to release, which is expected to be in May, 2006. We hopefully implemented 20% of possible features that should satisfy 80% of desktop projects. However, it's not late to suggest things and have them done before release. Please go to our discussion group and share what you think is still missing. From our side, apart from bug fixing we're working on another two cool features for 1.0:

• Own native launcher for Windows with platfrom-independent generator
• "Build flow" feature - ability to insert any custom ant calls between our generated build phases

These features will be added very soon. Keep in touch, please go to ProductiveMe.BuildDesk and share why BuildDesk doesn't help you as it should, and what we need to do to change it.

Download build 412

• Now, if you open BuildDesk and IDEA for the same project, you can just change things in IDEA -- BuildDesk will automatically load that changes. Very useful feature, especially if you're tiding up your IDEA project looking at error analysis provided by BuildDesk.
• Obfuscation: we supported "repackaging of obfuscated classes". If you turn on this option, BuildDesk will ask proguard to move obfuscated classes to default package. It works perfectly on any OS, despite a known proguard bug (look at generation of 'aux.class" or "prn.class") which caused a build to fail if run under Windows.
• Compilation: imported language level from your IDEA project now goes as a parameter to "javac" (for both -source and -target switches)

Download build 381

• If you want to provide your users with the option to download your application with bundled JRE, now you can do it! On the "Packaging" tab you will find this option (disabled by default): You can either specify JRE home or just zip your JRE in a single file. The later option is especially handy if you store the JRE in a version control system. Of course we use BuildDesk to build BuildDesk, so now it is available for download with bundled JRE as well.
• We exposed two features of the proguard obfuscator: These options are disabled by default since they need special attention. For instance, if you use picocontainer in your application, most likely you will have troubles with the "shrink" option, because shrinking implies removing unreferenced code.
• Now BuildDesk is available for free download and evaluation as a "demo" version: Demo version is fully functional with the exception that it doesn't save generated build file to to disk. This means that executing builds is only possible from BuildDesk's user interface.

Download build 358 This is a maintenance build, mostly aimed at resolving problems found by our early adopters. There are two significant features:

• If your project appears to be using global libraries or you added something like "IDEA_HOME\redist\forms_rt.jar" as a library to your IDEA project, BuildDesk will ask you to provide path to the IDEA installation and will read eveything from there. If don't have global libs or paths from IDEA_HOME -- you will not be asked about this. You can change it whenever you want, BuildDesk will help you with error highlighting anyway. For instance, if it cannot take any information about your libs, you will see something like this:
• BuildDesk now supports a tricky compilation feature of IDEA: nested source roots. If you feel like a hacker, you probably do this. If so, BuildDesk will compile your project anyway, as if it were compiled by IDEA. So whatever crazy configuation you have, BuildDesk will build everything, pack to jars, obfuscate and make installers. Enjoy!