Antelope as a Stand-Alone Application
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## Antelope as a Stand-Alone Application

Note: previous releases of Antelope recommended using Ant with the included "run.xml" to start Antelope. This is no longer recommended. If you have Java 1.5 and Ant 1.6 or 1.7, just run the jar file as below, or in Windows and some Linux distributions, you can double click the jar file to start Antelope.

Start Antelope by running:

        cd AntelopeApp_3.5.1
        java -jar AntelopeApp_3.5.1.jar

The first time you run this you will be asked to enter the location of the 'lib' directory of your Ant installation.

You can also install Antelope by hand. Antelope is packaged as a single jar file, Antelope.jar. Several other jar files may be necessary:

- ant.jar Antelope requires Ant to do anything useful. Ant is available at http://ant.apache.org. Put it in your classpath.

- (Ant 1.5.x) optional.jar This is an optional library that is distributed with Ant. It has additional Ant tasks that may be useful. Put it in your classpath as required.

- (Ant 1.6.x) ant-launcher.jar Ant 1.6.0 split the main ant.jar into a number of smaller files to improve performance and managability. For Ant 1.6.x, ant-launcher.jar is the file that is used to actually start Ant. This jar must also be in your classpath.

- tools.jar This is distributed with the Java Software Development Kit. If your build file makes use of any of the JDK tools (such as javac or javadoc), put this in your classpath.

- An XML parser This can be one of several publicly available XML parsers. Ant is shipped with the Xerces parser. To use the Xerces parser shipped with Ant, add xercesImpl.jar and xml-api.jar from the ${ant.home}/lib directory to your classpath. If you have Java 1.5, it also comes with a built-in XML parser. See the note about having multiple parsers in your classpath and how to get around this problem.

Unless you are running an older version of Java and/or an older version of Ant, just running the jar file will automatically include all necessary files.

Here is Antelope running as a stand-alone application:

Figure 5.2. Antelope as a stand-alone application

Antelope as a stand-alone application provides a few features not found in the plugin version. In the plugin version, these features are provided by jEdit, so are not duplicated. The additional features are:

- The "File" menu deals with the build file, providing the ability to create a new build file, open a build file and to save changes to the build file. Antelope provides some basic editing capabilities, but is not intended to be a full-featured editor. You may find other editors more suited to editing build files.

- Also on the "File" menu is the list of recently opened files. This is handy for choosing a file that was previously opened without using the file chooser.

- The "Output" menu provides the ability to save the Ant output to a file and to clear the 'Output' window.

- The "Options" menu provides the ability to set a number of options for the application:

  Figure 5.3. Font chooser

  The same font will be used for both the editor and output window.

  Figure 5.4. Editor options

  Figure 5.5. Syntax highlighting options

  Syntax hightlighting only applies to the editor window, not the output window.

Printing is not available in this version, but is on the feature list for implementation.

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