Advantages of ANT

• Only requires a Java VM to use.
• It is extended using Java classes, which makes it almost like fun for Java developers.
• Easier to do Java-specific tasks, such as JavaDocs, WAR and JAR files, and Enterprise JavaBeans.
• Instead of writing cryptic shell commands, the configuration files are easy to read XML.
• Each "task" is defined in a separate XML block, making adding or removing additional tasks easier.

Advantages Continued

• It's FAST! (Uses the same VM for entire process)
• Because it is Java based, it is easily expandable, and inherently cross-platform.
• All of the cool Java IDEs have built-in support for Ant.
• It can easily operate recursively, so only one Ant build script is required for most projects.
• Ant has built-in CVS support.
• Ant has built-in FTP support.
• Ant has built-in JUnit support.

How does ANT work?

• Ant commands (or tasks) are implemented by Java classes
• many tasks are in-built or come in JAR files
• custom commands can be easily created
• Each project using Ant will have a build file
• called build.xml - Ant's default
• Each build file is composed of any number of targets
• corresponding to common activities like compiling and running code

How does ANT work? (Contd)

• Each target is composed of tasks
• executed in sequence when the target is executed
• Ant targets can have dependencies

  for example, the build file may have a task to run file C, and can specify that before the file C can be run, package B needs to be compiled, and before package B is compiled, package A must be compiled.

Build file: example

	<project name="MyProject" default="dist" basedir=".">
    <description>
        simple example build file
    </description>
  <!-- set global properties for this build -->
  <property name="src" location="src"/>
  <property name="build" location="build"/>
  <property name="dist"  location="dist"/>

  <target name="init">
    <!-- Create the time stamp -->
    <tstamp/>
    <!-- Create the build directory used by compile -->
    <mkdir dir="${build}"/>
  </target>
					

Build file: example

		<target name="compile" depends="init"
        description="compile the source " >
    <!-- Compile code from ${src} into ${build} -->
    <javac srcdir="${src}" destdir="${build}"/>
  </target>

  <target name="dist" depends="compile"
        description="generate the distribution" >
    <!-- Create the distribution directory -->
    <mkdir dir="${dist}/lib"/>

    <!-- Put everything in ${build} into the MyProject-${DSTAMP}.jar file -->
    <jar jarfile="${dist}/lib/MyProject-${DSTAMP}.jar" basedir="${build}"/>
  </target>
							

Build file: example

		<target name="clean"
        description="clean up" >
    <!-- Delete ${build} and ${dist} dirs -->
    <delete dir="${build}"/>
    <delete dir="${dist}"/>
  </target>
</project>
						

Some Ant Commands

<ant/> calls a target in another build file useful to build subprojects

						<ant antfile="subproject/subbuild.xml" dir="subproject" target="compile"/>
						

<cvs/> executes any CVS command

						<cvs cvsRoot=":pserver:anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic" package="ant" dest="${ws.dir}" />
						

<exec/> executes a system command

						<exec dir="${src}" executable="cmd.exe" os="Windows 2000" output="dir.txt"> <arg line="/c dir"/> </exec>
						

Some Ant Commands

<javadoc/>generates javadoc HTML files from Java source files

							<javadoc packagenames="com.dummy.test.*"
           sourcepath="src"
           excludepackagenames="com.dummy.test.doc-files.*"
           destdir="docs/api"    author="true"    version="true" />
							

<mail/> sends email using SMTP

						<mail from="me" tolist="you" subject="Results of nightly build" files="build.log"/>
							

<mkdir/> creates a directory and any missing parent directories

							<mkdir dir="${dist}"/>	
							

Some Ant Commands

executes a sequence of SQL statements specified in the build file or an external text file, output can be written to a file

						<sql driver="org.database.jdbcDriver" url="jdbc:database-url" userid="sa" password="pass" src="data.sql" >
						

</sql>