Java Power Tools

Chapter 1. Setting Up a Project Using Ant

Ant in the Build Process

Ant is a popular and widely used open source build tool, written in Java. Indeed, it is probably the most widely used build tool in the Java world. It is supported by virtually all modern IDEs, and (being a Java application) runs on almost any Java-friendly platform.

In a nutshell, Ant helps you transform the source code, libraries, and other files that make up your project into a deliverable software package. And, more importantly, it helps you do this in an orderly, repeatable manner. If you design your build script well, you can also ensure that it will behave the same way on any machine. This leads the way to automatic builds, which can be run on a remote machine with little or no human intervention. In Part III, we discuss how to use Continuous Integration tools to take this process even further.

Ant is a highly flexible tool—you can make it do pretty much anything you want. However, this flexibility can come at a cost of complexity. Good Ant build scripts are written in a way that will be easy to read and maintain in a year’s time. In this chapter, I will try to show some best practices that should help make your scripts clean and readable.

Installing Ant

At the time of this writing, there were no graphical installers available, although Ant is now provided as a standard package for many Unix distributions. Nevertheless, you will often get a more complete installation if you download and install Ant manually.