May 2002
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
10h 50m
English
Content preview from Ant: The Definitive GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 5. User-Written Tasks
The concept of extending Ant through customization has been and still is its most important and acclaimed feature. The creators of Ant provide us with a system robust enough to work with the languages and tools available today and the ability to grow and work with the languages and tools of tomorrow. For example, tasks exist for working with the C# language, which did not exist when Ant first appeared in early 2000. Users have written tasks for working with third-party tools from groupware products, such as StarTeam (a version control system), to application servers such as BEA’s WebLogic or the JBoss Group’s JBoss. These changes and improvements came about with little or no changes to Ant’s core processing engine. Extending Ant without modifying its core engine is very important because it means the core Ant engine can be improved and modified separately from extension development. Development in both areas is done concurrently, resulting in modifications being made faster than had Ant been a monolithic system.
All Ant tasks are Java classes, and any programmer can extend the functionality of Ant by writing a new Java task class. These are user-written tasks, and take advantage of the same interface to Ant used by the core tasks shipped with an Ant distribution. The only differences between a user-written task and a core task are the author and the package location of the task (and sometimes that’s the same!). Otherwise, they both function on ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.