Turnleaf Design Ramblings of a junior developer

An intro to writing ANT Scripts

What is Ant?

A(nother) N(eat) T(ool) is a tool developed by the Apache Foundation for automating tasks in a project. It is primarily, though not exclusively used for Java projects. Most developers interaction with ant is through the xml specification, which is used to define specific operations.

The objective of this tutorial

Ant was designed with adaptability and expandability in mind, as a consequence it is used for many tasks and in many systems. As we get deeper in the dev environment series we will rely heavily on ant to make our lives easier and to carry out many important functions. For this tutorial however I will go cover what ant is primarily used for, building a project and creating a deliverable, in this case a jar file. This will provide a good intro into the usage of ant and how it works.

Technorati Tags: ANT, Automation, Java