We need a build tool

On an average, a developer spends a significant amount of time on routine tasks such as build and deployment, which include:

• Compiling code;
• Packaging binaries;
• Deploying the binaries to a test server;
• Testing changes;
• Copying code from one location to another.

To automate and simplify the above tasks, Apache Ant is useful. It is an operating system build and deployment tool that can be run from the command line.

Features of Apache Ant

• Ant is the most comprehensive Java build and deployment tool available;
• Ant is platform independent and can handle platform-specific properties such as file delimiters;
• Ant can be used to perform platform-specific tasks, such as changing the file modification time using the “touch” command;
• Ant scripts are written using simple XML. If you are already familiar with XML, you can learn Ant fairly quickly.
• Ant is good at automating complex repetitive tasks;
• Ant comes with a large list of predefined tasks.;
• Ant provides an interface for developing custom tasks;
• Ant is easily invoked from the command line and can integrate with free and commercial IDEs.

Ant is the most comprehensive Java build and deployment tool available.

Ant is platform-independent and can handle platform-specific properties such as file delimiters.

Ant can be used to perform platform-specific tasks, such as changing the file modification time with the “touch” command.

Ant scripts are written using simple XML. If you are already familiar with XML, you can learn Ant fairly quickly.

The post Apache Ant Features appeared first on Asjava.

Download, install, test

Linux: install from the repository with a command like sudo apt-get install ant (replace apt-get with yum if necessary). Important: we need a version at least 1.8.*. The CentOS 6.8 repository has version 1.7.1, so it is better to use the script described in the previous article.

Windows: go to ant.apache.org, go to Download/Binary Distributions and download the apache-ant-1.10.1-bin.zip archive (there may be a more recent version available now). Copy the contents of the archive to any directory, for example to “C:\Program Files\Apache Ant”. Then add the path to the bin directory (C:\Program Files/Apache Ant/bin) to the Path system variable.

Write HelloWorld script

<?xml version="1.0"?
Hello, World!

Create a subdirectory hello in the home directory (in Linux this is done with the mkdir command, in Windows with the md command) and save a file named build.xml containing the above script.

Basic principles of operation

The build script is a regular XML file. The text opens (and closes) with the project tag, where you can specify a project name and a default target. It then contains the definition of targets, dependencies and properties. The simplest script must have at least one target. In the target tag we describe the invocation of one or more tasks. The target can be named using the name attribute (name=”name_of_target”).

Minimum required list of tasks

The standard version of Ant contains more than 150 tasks. We will only need seven so far:

• echo – output messages to the console;
• mkdir – create directories;
• delete – deleting files and directories;
• javac – compile Java code;
• java – run class and jar files;
• jar – create jar file;
• junit – run tests.

Script for building and testing a Java project

Ant provides full freedom in forming the directory structure.

The post Apache Ant – Quick Start appeared first on Asjava.