Slides for internal team training

1. An introduction

2. Agenda
Ant, and why to use it
Ant terminology and concepts
Installing and executing Ant
Core Ant tasks
A working build script
Ant techniques and patterns

3. What is ant ?
Ant is the ubiquitous build tool in Java environments
Ant is implemented in Java
Ant is Open Source, maintained by Apache
Ant is cross platform and portable
Ant is well suited to a large number of automation
and scripting tasks
Ant is not a programming language

4. What can Ant do ?
Ant can get source code from version control (CVS)
Ant can compile source code
Ant can run unit tests
Ant can package compiled code and resources
Ant can handle dependencies between targets
Build automation (cron)
More details on all these later...

5. Installation
i. Download the binaries from
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/index.html,
unzip them to a suitable directory.
ii. Define ANT_HOME to be the location where Ant was
unzipped
iii. Define JAVA_HOME to be the location where the
JDK is installed
iv. Add %ANT_HOME%bin;%JAVA_HOME%bin to
the PATH

6. Ant Basic build.xml example
<?xmlversion="1.0"?>
<project name="test“ default="compile“ basedir=".">
<property name="src“ value="."/>
<property name="build“ value="build"/>
<target name="init">
<mkdirdir="${build}"/>
</target>
<target name="compile“ depends="init">
<!--Compilethejavacode-->
<javac srcdir="${src}“ destdir="${build}"/>
</target>
</project>
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7. Ant techniques & patterns
Use simple targets
Each target do a single well defined job
Use standard targets
Easier for other people
Use properties.xml for configurability