Ant in Action

Chapter 6. Executing programs

6.1	Running programs under Ant—an introduction
6.2	Running native programs
6.3	Advanced <java> and <exec>
6.4	Bulk operations with <apply>
6.5	How it all works
6.6	Best practices
6.7	Summary

So far, our code compiles and the tests pass. Ant is packaging it into JAR files and then into Zip and tar packages for distribution.

This means it’s time to explore the capabilities of Ant to execute programs, both Java and native. Ant is one of the best tools for starting programs in Java; it wraps all the platform-specific details into a few tasks. It’s so useful that it’s often used behind the scenes in many applications.

Ant’s execution services come in three tasks, <java>, <exec>, and <apply>, that together meet ...