Presents your 
JAVA E-NEWSLETTER for March 13, 2003

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MAKE MUNDANE DEV TASKS EASIER WITH ANT

The cycle of writing, compiling, and running code can become tedious;
and the more complex the application, the more tedious it can be. Build
tools help you build and deploy your applications.

The standard Java build tool is currently Ant. It doesn't take a lot of
work to use Ant with Java projects. First, you have to download and
install Ant. (Ant is well documented, and the manual will guide you 
through each step of the installation.)

Then create a build file--an XML file that contains Ant targets--for
your project.

Here is a sample Ant build file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
 <project default="jar" name="javatips" basedir=".">
 <property name="classesdir" value="bin" />
 <property name="java.src" value="src" />
 <property name="jar.file" value="javatips.jar" />
 <target name="clean">
 <delete file="${jar.file}" />
 </target>
 <target name="compile" description="Compile the code">
 <javac destdir="${classesdir}" deprecation="true" debug="true"
optimize="false" excludes="**/package.html">
 <src>
 <pathelement location="${java.src}" />
 </src>
 <classpath>
 <fileset dir="lib">
 <include name="*.jar" />
 </fileset>
 </classpath>
 </javac>
 </target>
 <target name="jar" description="Create the jar" depends="compile">
 <jar jarfile="javatips.jar" excludes="**/package.html"
basedir="${classesdir}" />
 </target>
 </project>

A basic unit of work in Ant is called a target. Each target should
represent a separate part of the build process: compile, jar, war, doc, 
etc.

Ant targets can have dependencies. If a target has a dependency, then
the dependency will be executed before the specified target that 
depends on it.

Here's a sample target:

<target name="jar" description="Create the jar" depends="compile">
    <jar jarfile="target/${final.name}.jar" excludes="**/package.html"
basedir="${classesdir}"></jar>
</target>

The identifiers beginning with a dollar sign and enclosed in brackets
are Ant properties. See the Ant documentation for an explanation of
properties.

You can specify a default target in your build file's project element:

<project default="jar" name="code316" basedir=".">

The default target will be executed if you run Ant with no options, 
like this:

>ant
Buildfile: build.xml

compile:
    [javac] Compiling 2 source files to bin
jar:
      [jar] Building jar: javatips.jar

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 second

You can also specify a target or targets to build when you run Ant. The
following command would run the "clean" target.

>ant clean
Buildfile: build.xml

clean:
   [delete] Deleting: javatips.jar
   [delete] Deleting 2 files from bin

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds

With a small amount of effort, you can reduce the complexity of a
mundane but sometimes difficult task. The bigger your project, the more 
you'll benefit from using Ant.

Learn more about Ant's other features, including CVS access, FTP, and
program execution. http://ant.apache.org/

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