MC365 Ant

Today We Will Cover: Overview of Ant Installing Ant Using the Ant command line tool Various Ant commands available Using Ant in Eclipse

Overview of Ant Ant is an open source tool that is part of the Jakarta project It is a build/deployment tool. What is a build/deployment tool? –Once you have finished coding your web application (including servlets, jsp’s, html, gifs, etc), you need to compile and move (or deploy) these components to various destinations before you can use them. –For example, you need to compile and deploy your servlets to the classes folder in Tomcat and your jsp’s to your jsp folder –With a large web application containing many components, this can get complicated. –Also, you may want to deploy to multiple servers (for load balanced systems, or for test/QA systems, etc).

Overview of Ant Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, but without many of Make's problems. Why another build tool when there is already make, gnumake, nmake, jam, and others? –Because all those tools have limitations when developing software across multiple platforms. –Make-like tools are inherently shell-based -- they evaluate a set of dependencies, then execute commands not unlike what you would issue in a shell. This means that you can easily extend these tools by using or writing any program for the OS that you are working on. However, this also means that you limit yourself to the OS, or at least the OS type such as Unix, that you are working on.

Overview of Ant More reasons to choose Ant over Make: –Makefiles are much mjore difficult to use. Make is notorious for not working due to simple formatting errors like having a space in front of a tab –Ant is different. Instead of a model where it is extended with shell-based commands, Ant is extended using Java classes. Instead of writing shell commands, the configuration files are XML-based, calling out a target tree where various tasks get executed. Each task is run by an object that implements a particular Task interface. –Granted, this removes some of the expressive power that is inherent by being able to construct a shell command such as `find. -name foo -exec rm {}`, but it gives you the ability to be cross platform -- to work anywhere and everywhere. And if you really need to execute a shell command, Ant has an task that allows different commands to be executed based on the OS that it is executing on.

Installing Ant To install Ant go to: –Click on the link to download the zip archive if you are using Windows. –Save it to your hard drive and unzip into a folder you create (e.g. c:\ant). –Add the ant\bin lib to your system Path variable. –Set the ANT_HOME variable to the directory where you installed Ant –Set the JAVA_HOME variable to where your jdk is installed –Assume Ant is installed in c:\ant\. The following sets up the environment: set ANT_HOME=c:\ant\jakarta-ant set JAVA_HOME=c:\j2sdk1.4.1_01 set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin

Using the Ant Command Line Tool Once you have installed Ant, you are ready to set up your deployment specifications for your web application. –To do this you need to create a build.xml file for your application. –Each application will probably have its own build.xml file. Click here to see an example of a simple build.xml file.build.xml To execute the build.xml file, simply call type “ant” in that directory –Or type “ant {target1} {target2}…” Go to and click on Running Ant to see various ant command options.

Various Ant Commands Available Ant is a very powerful tool that can do many things. Again, we could spend an entire semester talking about the various Ant tasks. In fact, there are people who do this full-time. They are called build engineers. As Software Engineers, you should be familiar with the basic functionality of Ant. –It will also make development a lot easier. Read the documentation on this site for extensive information on Ant. There is some great information under the Manual link under Documentation. –For a list of Ant tasks go to and click on Ant Tasks.

Using Ant in Eclipse Like CVS, Eclipse allows developers to write their build.xml files and execute them from within the IDE making development a lot easier. To define the classpath, go to Window- Preferences and click on External Tools-Ant- Classpath –The basic jars you need to run Ant should already be there. You can import/export/work on a build.xml file just like any other file in Eclipse.

Using Ant in Eclipse To run the build.xml for an application, go to Run- External Tools-Configure. –Click New –Give it a name –For Tool Location, click Browse Workspace and find the build.xml –For Tool Arguments, click Browse Variables, highlight Ant Targets and select the targets you want –Click Ok –Then go back to Run and choose the name you gave your configuration.