init() Method

The init method gets called when the <taskname> xml element closes. It must be implemented even if it does nothing like in the example above. You can do init steps here required to setup your task object properly. After calling the Init-Method the task object remains untouched by the parser. Init should not perform operations related somehow to the action the task performs. An example of using init may be cleaning up the $strMessage variable in our example (i.e. trim($strMessage)) or importing additional workers needed for this task.

The init method should return true or an error object evaluated by the governing logic. If you don't implement init method, phing will shout down with a fatal error.