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Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to make but is written in the Java language and is primarily intended for use with Java. Image File history File links Ant_logo_large. ...
The correct title of this article is make. ...
Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ...
The most immediately noticeable difference between Ant and make is that Ant uses a file in XML format to describe the build process and its dependencies, whereas make has its own Makefile format. By default the XML file is named build.xml. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. ...
Ant is an Apache project. It is open source software, and is released under the Apache Software License. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit corporation (classified as 501(c)3 in the United States) to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. ...
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The Apache Software License is an open source license used by the Apache Software Foundation. ...
Portability
One of the primary aims of Ant was to solve make's portability problems. In a Makefile the actions required to create a target are specified as shell commands which are specific to the current platform, usually a Unix shell. Ant solves this problem by providing a large amount of built-in functionality which it can then guarantee will behave (nearly) identically on all platforms. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Shell_(computing). ...
In computing, a platform describes some sort of framework, either in hardware or software, which allows software to run. ...
A Unix shell, also called the command line, provides the traditional user interface for the Unix operating system. ...
For example, in the sample build.xml file above the clean target deletes the classes directory and everything in it. In a Makefile this would typically be done with the command:
rm -rf classes/ rm is a Unix specific command which will probably not be available if the Makefile is used in a non-Unix environment such as Microsoft Windows. In an Ant build file the same thing would be accomplished using a built in command: The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ...
Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ...
<delete dir="classes"/> A common discrepancy between different platforms is the way in which directory paths are specified. Unix uses a forward slash (/) to delimit the components of a path, whereas Windows uses a backslash (). Ant build files let authors choose their favorite convention, forward slashes or back slashes for directories, semicolon or colon for path separators. It converts everything to the appropriate format for the current platform. In computing, a platform describes some sort of framework, either in hardware or software, which allows software to run. ...
History Ant was invented by James Duncan Davidson while turning a product from Sun into open source. The product later became Apache Tomcat; it was Sun's reference JSP/Servlet engine. The closed source make tool could be used to build it on the Solaris Operating Environment, but in the open source world there was no way of controlling which platform was used to build Tomcat. Ant was created as a simple tool to take an XML "build file" and use it to build Tomcat, regardless of which platform the developer was using. From this humble beginning, the tool has gone on to become more ubiquitous - and perhaps successful - than the Tomcat product for which it was created. Ant was first officially released as a stand-alone product on 19 July 2000, with Ant 1.1. It has come to be the underpinning of open source Java; developers expect a "build.xml" file with every project. James Duncan Davidson, born July 29th, 1970 in Lubbock Texas, raised in Oklahoma and Texas. ...
Sun Microsystems, Inc. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
Tomcat functions as a servlet container developed under the Jakarta Project at the Apache Software Foundation. ...
JSP or JavaServer Pages, known to some as the Java Scripting Preprocessor, is a Java technology that allows developers to dynamically generate HTML, XML or some other type of web page. ...
The Java Servlet API allows a software developer to add dynamic content to a web server using the Java platform. ...
The correct title of this article is make. ...
This article contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. ...
Because it makes it trivial to integrate JUnit tests with the build process, Ant has made it easy for willing developers to adopt test-driven development, and even Extreme Programming. Its sole potential competitor is currently Maven. JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language. ...
Test-driven development (TDD) is a Computer programming technique that involves writing tests first and then implementing the code to make them pass. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Maven is a software tool for Java programming language project management and automated software build. ...
The name is said to be an acronym for "Another Neat Tool". Coincidentally, the word "ant" was also used as an arbitrarily chosen project name in the paper Recursive Make Considered Harmful [1], which described build-related problems that Apache Ant later proposed to resolve. The correct title of this article is make. ...
Limitations - Ant build files must be written in XML. Some consider this a barrier to new users as well as a problem in very large projects when build files can become very large and complex. This may be a problem common to all XML languages, but the granularity of Ant's tasks (compared to, say Maven), means that the scalability problems arrive early.
- Many of the older tasks — the core ones that are used every day, such as <javac>, <exec> and <java> — default values for options that are not consistent with more recent tasks. Changing those defaults would break existing tasks.
- When expanding properties in a string or text element, undefined properties are not raised as an error, but left as an unexpanded reference (e.g. ${unassigned.property}).
- Ant has limited fault handling rules, and no persistence of state, so it cannot be safely used to manage a multi-day build.
Maven is a software tool for Java programming language project management and automated software build. ...
See also Image File history File links Wikibooks-logo-en. ...
CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. ...
SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool. ...
The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ...
References - Jessy Tilly, Eric M. Burke: Ant - The Definitive Guide, O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN 0-596-00184-3
- Erik Hatcher, Steve Loughran: Java Development with Ant, Manning Publications, ISBN 1-930110-58-8
- Glenn Niemeyer, Jeremy Poteet: Extreme Programming with Ant, Sams, ISBN 0-672-32562-4
- Alan Williamson: Ant - Developer's Handbook, Sams, ISBN 0-672-32426-1
- Bernd Matzke: Ant, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 3-8273-2066-6
External links
By Bhanu Prakash S.P.
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