About this Book
This book is about Ant, the award-winning Java build tool. Ant has become the centerpiece of so many projects’ build processes because it’s 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, Apache’s Java web server, it has grown to be a stand-alone tool adopted across the Java community, and in doing so 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’re an experienced Ant user, we’ll show you how to “push the envelope” in using Ant. We 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 the way to build, test, and release your application.