10 Minutes Guide to Ant
Introduction
Well for the next 10 minutes get ready to devote to the ant guide. This will
make some sence to the ant.
Ant is a free tool under GNU Licence and is freely available at http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/
, current version of ant is 1.4.1. Ant allows the developer to automate the
repeated process involved in the development of J2EE application. Developers can
easily write the script to automate the build process like compilation,
archiving and deployment.
For this tutorial I am using 1.4.1 and jdk1.4. I am also using Jboss 3.0
(with tomcat) downloaded from http://www.apache.org
to deploy and test J2EE application developed in this lesson. In order to understand this tutorial you should have a solid knowledge of java programming
and development of web application using java technologies.
Lesson 1
Downloading and Installing Ant
Before installing Ant make sure you have JDK1.3 or above installed on your
machine.
For this tutorial download ant from http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/
and unzip the file into your favorite directory.
Set the class path to the bin directory of the ant.
Let's assume that Ant is installed in c:\ant\. The following
code has to be put into autoexec.bat file:
set ANT_HOME=c:\ant
set JAVA_HOME=c:\jdk1.3
set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin
Testing Ant
Go to command prompt and issue the following command.
C:\anttest>Ant
Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!Build failed
C:\anttest>
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If every this is installed correctly Ant will give the above message.
Now its time to do some work with Ant.
Ant uses configuration file called build.xml to work. This is the file
where you defines the process of compiling, building and deploying.
Writing build.xml file
build.xml is a xml file used by ant utility to compile, build and deploy
or run the application.
Now here is code of simple build.xml file which compiles a java file
present in src directory and places compiled class file in build/src
directory.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- Build file for our first application -->
<project name="Ant test project" default="build"
basedir=".">
<target name="build" >
<javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/src"
debug="true"
includes="**/*.java"
/>
</target>
</project>
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First line of the build.xml file represents the document type declaration.
Next line is comment entry. Third line is the project tag. Each buildfile
contains one project tag and all the instruction are written in the project tag.
The project tag:
<project name="Ant test project" default="build"
basedir=".">
requires three attributes namely name, default and basedir.
Here is the description of the attributes:
| Attribute |
Description |
| name |
Represents the name of the project. |
| default |
Name of the default target to use when no target is
supplied. |
| basedir |
Name of the base directory from which all path
calculations are done. |
All the attributes are required.
One project may contain one or more targets. In this example there is only
one target.
<target name="build" >
<javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/src"
debug="true"
includes="**/*.java"
/>
</target>
Which uses task javac to compile the java files.
Here is the code of our test1.java file which is to be compiled by the Ant
utility.
class test1{
public static void main (String args[]){
System.out.println("This is example 1");
}
}
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Download the code of this tutorial and unzip it in c:\. files will be
unzipped in anttest directory. To run the Ant utility to compile the file go to c:\anttest\example1 and issue ant command. You will receive the following out put.
C:\anttest\example1>ant
Buildfile: build.xml
build:
[javac] Compiling 1 source file to C:\anttest\example1\build\src
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 4 seconds
C:\anttest\example1>
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Above mentioned process compiles the file and places in the build\src
directory.
In the next lesson I will show you how to use ant to compile, build and
deploy your web application to the Jboss 3.0
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