Java Development With Ant

The most widely used build tool for Java projects, Ant is cross-platform, extensible, simple, and fast. It scales from small personal projects to large, multi-team J2EE projects. And, most important, it's easy to learn.

Java Development with Ant systematically explores what Ant can do, and how to apply it to your project. Whether you are new to Ant, or an experienced user, this book will show you powerful and creative uses for Ant. The book emphasizes basic concepts you need to know to effectively use Ant starting with Ant's XML-driven build process. It leads you step-by-step through everything you need to know to compile, test, package and deploy an application. It then guides you through the maze of more complex situations common in larger projects such as enterprise Java applications and Web Services. With this book you will gain access to a powerful tool to automatically build, test and deploy your Java software, no matter how simple or complex it might be.

What's inside:

• The new Ant 1.5 features
• Ant's datatypes and property handling
• JUnit testing and reporting
• Continuous integration techniques
• XDoclet for attribute-oriented programming
• EJB generation, building, and packaging
• Writing and testing native code
• Building Web Services with Apache Axis
• Deploying your system to multiple remote servers
• Using and writing
  • Loggers
  • Listeners
  • Selectors
  • Custom tasks

Table of Contents

Learning Ant

1. Introducing Ant
2. Getting started with Ant
3. Understanding Ant datatypes and properties
4. Testing with JUnit
5. Executing programs
6. Packaging projects
7. Deployment
8. Putting it all together

Applying Ant

9. Using Ant in your development projects
10. Beyond Ant’s core tasks
11. XDoclet
12. Developing for the web
13. Working with XML
14. Enterprise JavaBeans
15. Working with web services
16. Continuous integration
17. Developing native code
18. Production deployment

Extending Ant

19. Writing Ant tasks
20. Extending Ant further

A. Installation
B. XML primer as it applies to Ant
C. IDE integration
D. The elements of Ant style
E. Ant task reference