Script2Ant – a tool for cross-platform scripting between different operating systems

Abstract

When developing a software system developers use the scripts of a given operating system (e.g. Windows) to solve certain problems and tasks. Adapting such platform-dependent scripts to another platform is an expensive, difficult work, and often some of the original commands do not even have equivalents on the new platform. During the evolution of the software no common code-set is established for the scripts belonging to the various platforms, thus several script codes with identical functionality have to be maintained–which, of course, means extra costs. This article introduces the prototype of our tool, Script2Ant. Script2Ant converts a script system constructed for a given platform (e.g. Windows) to a common platform-independent format, so that it could be run on any other platform (e.g. Linux). Easy extendability of the program is ensured by the General Command Mapping Language (GCML) related to the program, by which general descriptions can be established for the commands of any platform. The operation of the prototype developed is shown through a real-life regression test.

Publication
Proceedings of the 11th Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools (SPLST 2009), Tampere, Finland, Pages 45–58

BibTeX:

@InProceedings{HFF09,
    author    = {Heged{\H{u}}s, Gy\"orgy and F{\"u}l{\"o}p, Lajos Jen\H{o} and Ferenc, Rudolf},
    title     = {{Script2Ant} -- a tool for cross-platform scripting between different operating systems},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools (SPLST 2009)},
    year      = {2009},
    pages     = {45--58},
    address   = {Tampere, Finland},
    month     = aug,
    keywords  = {Cross-platform, platform-independent, OS script, batch, ANT, GCML},
}