We have already outlined the contents of the user action catalog, the properties file and the documentation file in our earlier discussion. The final step is to compile the source file and build the archive file that will hold the class files and the plugin's other resources.

Publicly released plugins include with their source a makefile in XML format for the Ant utility. The format for this file requires few changes from plugin to plugin. Here is a version of build.xml that could be used by QuickNotepad:

<project name="QuickNotepad"
         default="build">
    <description>
        This is an ant build.xml file for building the QuickNotepad plugin for jEdit.
    </description>
    <property name="user-doc.xml"
          value="users-guide.xml" />
    <property file="build.properties" />
    <property file="../build.properties" />
	<property name="build.support"
			  value="../../../build-support" />    
    <import file="${build.support}/plugin-build.xml" />
</project>

This build file imports another modular build file, plugin-build.xml from the build-support project. It is available as a package you can check out from subversion, or found online in the jEdit's SVN repository. It contains the common build steps used to build the core jEdit plugins, and some example build.properties.sample files which you can adapt for use with your development environment.

Customizing this build file for a different plugin will likely only require three changes to build.xml file:

Because this build file and the one of most plugins import a build.properties file from the current and the parent directories, it is possible to build most of jEdit's plugins in a uniform way by setting the common properties in a single build.properties file, placed in the plugin source's parent directory.