How to get access to the Websphere 6.1 ant tasks from vanilla ant (not ws_ant)

Question

I guess I need to know what I need in the classpath (what jar) in order to execute WebSphere 6.1 ant tasks. If someone can provide an example that would be perfect.

Answer 1

The Actual Websphere Ant tasks are defined in wsanttasks.jar. A possible path for linux Systems is /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/lib/wsanttasks.jar.

However i doubt that you will be successfull just by including that, as i do remember trying it once and it failed because of dependecies. However it is not impossible to do it as ws_ant is just a wrapper script which adds all the required classpaths and calls the inbuilt ant. So if you have time to look into the ws_ant script you will be able to get all the required classpath's.

By the way is there any special reason why you want to avoid ws_ant, that will surely make your life simple.

Answer 2

For Websphere 6.1, you can use the jar com.ibm.ws.runtime_6.1.0.jar to access the ant tasks.

On Windows, the jar is located in the plugins directory (for me this is: C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\plugins).