ABOUT
Why it is called Ant - According to Ant's original author, James Duncan Davidson, the name is an acronym for "Another Neat Tool".
Tips -
- Default is build.xml - but you can always give any name you want.
- The ant build xml file is defined in <project> tag
<project name="myproj">
</project>
- The properties file is mentioned as
<property file="build.properties"/>
- If there is any user specific properties file, that should be mentioned before, as the precedence is given preference
- The ant build file typically consists of one or more targets
<target name="assemble.all" depends="assemble.ui">
<echo message="assemble all is called "/>
</target>
- A target can have a sub ant task
<subant genericantfile="${ant.file}" inheritall="true"
target="_ui.assemble" failonerror="true">
<filelist dir="." files="ui"/>
</subant>
filelist dir -- all the files in the directory
file="ui" -- the folder where the files are located
genericantfile -- means the sub ant task is located in the same file , you can call another file in different location
- You can define macros
<macrodef name="property-join">
<attribute name="name"/>
<attribute name="first"/>
<attribute name="second"/>
<sequential>
<property name="@{name}" value="${@{first}@{second}}"/>
</sequential>
</macrodef>
This basically appends to variables and assigns the value to a different variable
- There are readily available tasks provided by Ant such as
1. <jar> </jar>
2. <war> </war> and so on... for more information please refer to Ant project
- Here is an example for creating a war file
<war destfile="${build.dir}/myfirst.war"
webxml="${config.dir}/web.xml"
basedir="${src.web.dir}"
duplicate="preserve">
<!-- All the built classes in the ui tier -->
<classes dir="${build.classes.dir}"/>
// adding libraries to the war file
<!-- add log4j -->
<lib dir="${log4j.lib.dir}/">
<include name="log4j-1.2.6.jar"/>
</lib>
<!-- add struts jars -->
<lib dir="${struts.lib.dir}/">
<include name="*.jar"/>
</lib>
// adding libraries to the war file
<!-- Tiles tag libraries -->
<webinf dir="${struts.lib.dir}">
<include name="struts-tiles.tld"/>
</webinf>
<!-- The files from the config directory that need to go into the
WEB-INF directory -->
<webinf dir="${config.dir}">
<include name="*.xml"/>
<exclude name="*.properties"/>
<include name="*.tld"/>
<exclude name="*.configuration.properties"/>
<exclude name="configuration.xml"/>
<exclude name="environment.xml"/>
</webinf>
</war>
</target>
Ant Version
|
Release Date
|
1.6.4
|
28 April 2005
|
1.6.5
|
2 June 2005
|
1.7.0
|
19 December 2006
|
1.7.1
|
27 June 2008
|
Ant Versions
Struts
Ant
TAGS
Narendra Kumar Dantala
A J2EE Developer
Having a masters degree in Computational Science, working in Java, developed applications on different domains such as Finanical Services, B2B, Banking, Utility...