Chapter 2. Introduction
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## Chapter 2. Introduction

Due to changes in the jEdit API, Antelope plugin versions prior to 2.60 are for jEdit 4.1, versions 2.60 and later require jEdit 4.2 or later.

Disclaimer: Typically, the documentation is not quite up-to-date with the software. There may be some discrepancies between the text and pictures in this guide from what you see when you run the application. If you see a problem with this documentation, please post a bug at http://antelope.tigris.org. Thank you!

Antelope is a graphical user interface for running Ant. It provides a set of buttons, one per target, which makes it easy to start a specific Ant operation. Basically, an Ant build file is opened with Antelope and the targets defined in the build file can be executed by clicking a button. Antelope is much more than a thin wrapper around Ant, however.

Antelope can run in two different environments. It can run as a stand-alone GUI application and as a plugin to jEdit (www.jedit.org), an excellent open source editor for programmers.

As a stand-alone application, Antelope provides the ability to create and edit Ant build files, the ability to run build file targets, and can trace target and task execution in a quasi-debug mode. Output from the build process can be captured to a file and/or to screen and performance statistics can be gathered to guide optimization efforts. Several very useful tasks to extend Ant are included.

As a jEdit plugin, Antelope expands the features of the stand-alone application to nicely integrate with the text editor and with the Console and ErrorList plugins. Antelope has an open API that allows other plugins to utilize Antelope's capabilities.

In either mode, Antelope provides property and reference inspection and the ability to set properties that would be passed as parameters to Ant on the command line.

Figure 2.1. Introducing Antelope

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