This book is about Ant, the award-winning Java build tool. Ant has become the centerpiece of so many projects’ build processes because it is easy to use, is platform independent, and addresses the needs of today’s projects to automate testing and deployment. From its beginnings as a helper application to compile Tomcat, Sun’s (now Apache’s) Java web server, it has grown to be a stand-alone tool adopted by all major open source Java projects, and has changed people’s expectations of their development tools.
If you have never before used Ant, this book will introduce you to it, taking you systematically through the core stages of most Java projects: compilation, testing, execution, packaging, and delivery. If you are an experienced Ant user, we will show you how to “push the envelope” in using Ant. Indeed, we believe that some of the things shown in this book were never before done with Ant. We also place an emphasis on how to use Ant as part of a large project, drawing out best practices from our own experiences.
Whatever your experience with Ant, we believe that you will learn a lot from this book, and that your software projects will benefit from using Ant as a foundation of their build process.
WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOKThis book is for all Java developers working on software projects ranging from the simple personal project to the enterprise-wide team effort. We assume no prior experience of Ant, although even experienced Ant users should find much to interest them in the later chapters. We do expect our readers to have basic knowledge of Java, although the novice Java developer will benefit from learning Ant in conjunction with Java. Some of the more advanced Ant projects, such as building Enterprise Java applications and web services, are going to be of interest primarily to those people working in those areas. We will introduce these technology areas, but will defer to other books to cover them fully.
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