10 Minutes Guide to Ant

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Introduction

Well for the next 10 minutes get ready to devote to the ant guide. This will make some
sence to the ant.

Ant is a free tool under GNU Licence and is freely available at

http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/ , current version of ant is 1.4.1. Ant allows the developer to
automate the repeated process involved in the development of J2EE application.
Developers can easily write the script to automate the build process like compilation,
archiving and deployment.

For this tutorial I am using 1.4.1 and jdk1.4. I am also using Jboss 3.0 (with tomcat)
downloaded from http://www.apache.org to deploy and test J2EE application developed
in this lesson. In order to understand this tutorial you should have a solid knowledge of
java programming and development of web application using java technologies.

Lesson 1

Downloading and Installing Ant

Before installing Ant make sure you have JDK1.3 or above installed on your machine.

For this tutorial download ant from http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/ and unzip the file into
your favorite directory.

Set the class path to the bin directory of the ant.

Let's assume that Ant is installed in c:\ant\. The following code has to be put into
autoexec.bat file:

set ANT_HOME=c:\ant
set JAVA_HOME=c:\jdk1.3
set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin

Testing Ant

Go to command prompt and issue the following command.

C:\anttest>Ant

Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!Build

failed

C:\anttest>

If every this is installed correctly Ant will give the above message.

Now its time to do some work with Ant.

Ant uses configuration file called build.xml to work. This is the file where you defines
the process of compiling, building and deploying.

Writing build.xml file

build.xml is a xml file used by ant utility to compile, build and deploy or run the
application.

Now here is code of simple build.xml file which compiles a java file present in src
directory and places compiled class file in build/src directory.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!-- Build file for our first application -->

<project name="Ant test project" default="build" basedir=".">

<target name="build" >

<javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/src" debug="true"

includes="**/*.java"

/>

</target>

</project>
First line of the build.xml file represents the document type declaration. Next line is comment entry. Third
line is the project tag. Each buildfile contains one project tag and all the instruction are written in the
project tag.

The project tag:

<project name="Ant test project" default="build" basedir=".">

requires three attributes namely name, default and basedir.

Here is the description of the attributes:

Attribute Description
name Represents the name of the project.
default Name of the default target to use when no target is supplied.
basedir Name of the base directory from which all path calculations are done.

All the attributes are required.

One project may contain one or more targets. In this example there is only one target.

<target name="build" >

<javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/src" debug="true"

includes="**/*.java"

/>

</target>

Which uses task javac to compile the java files.

Here is the code of our test1.java file which is to be compiled by the Ant utility.

class test1{

public static void main (String args[]){

System.out.println("This is example 1");

}
Download the code of this tutorial and unzip it in c:\. files will be unzipped in anttest
directory. To run the Ant utility to compile the file go to c:\anttest\example1 and issue
ant command. You will receive the following out put.

C:\anttest\example1>ant

Buildfile: build.xml

build:

[javac] Compiling 1 source file to C:\anttest\example1\build\src

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 4 seconds

C:\anttest\example1>

Above mentioned process compiles the file and places in the build\src directory.

In the next lesson I will show you how to use ant to compile, build and deploy your web
application to the Jboss 3.0