In one of our projects at work I really wanted to use CoffeeScript as a tool to create better scoped and JSLint friendly JavaScript. The problem I ran into was that we are using Apache Ant and getting the .coffee to .js was a bit of a chore.

I played around with using the coffee.exe from github. This approach worked, but as our conversion of files and lines grew so did the compile time. We needed something smarter that could inspect files and skip unmodified files.

I found the CoffeeScript compiling ant task project out on github. This worked well, but was on an older version of CoffeeScript 0.9.0 and would output all the .js files under a single destination directory. Meaning all the cs/*/.coffee files would output to one single directory. We really wanted to inherit the directory structure and keep the compiled JavaScripts neatly tucked into their respective directory structures.

I decided to fork and update the project. In doing so I also learned a bit about creating custom ant tasks. Hopefully anyone else out there who is using ant and wants to use CoffeeScript finds this helpful. A huge thanks to Patrick Mueller for creating this project. With a few small tweaks it has become essential in our JS->CS migration.

Here is the 0.1.6 Change Log:

0.1.6 – 2012/11/26

• Updated to CoffeeScript 1.4.0
• Changed Task for CoffeeScriptC to inherit Task instead of MatchingTask so we can add a boolean flag to optionally inherit directory nesting. The new flag is called nesting.
• Changed noWrap to the new bare param for coffee-script compiler.
• Added download directory containing versioned jars.

You can get more details at https://github.com/ctoestreich/CoffeeScriptAntTasks. The latest 0.1.6 jar can be found in the downloads directory of the project or the downloads section of github.