Java Reference
In-Depth Information
9.5
R EVIEW
We've taken a very quick tour through the most popular tool for building and
deploying Java applications. We've shown you how to install and set up ant .
We've given you enough description of XML so that you can read an ant
buildfile. We've touched briefly on the basic tags used in most buildfiles.
9.6
W HAT Y OU S TILL D ON ' T K NOW
What we've covered here will probably explain most of the buildfiles you en-
counter in the wild. It will probably also give you what you need to know to
build most of the buildfiles you will have to build. But we have left out a
fair amount.
You can write your own tasks. That's a biggie right there. There are many
built-in tasks that we didn't cover. Look those up. They might be just what
you need if you find yourself saying, “Boy, ant is nice, but I wish it could
do X.” X might already be a built-in task. And if not, you can write it.
Ant has datatypes that can often be used in place of the simple strings al-
lowed in task attributes. Tasks and datatypes are instances of Java base classes
defined in the source code for ant . If you download the source, you can write
your own classes that extend these base classes and you can thus add your own
tags to ant .
9.7
R ESOURCES
The Ant User's Manual 12 at the Ant project homepage 13 (which itself is
part of the Apache Project 14 ) is the definitive resource for ant .
12. http://ant.apache.org/manual/
13. http://ant.apache.org/
14. http://apache.org/
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