Class 13: Java Project Management with Ant

Held: Friday, 24 September 2004

Related Pages:

• EBoard.
• Examples.
• Ant Web Page.

Due

• Homework 3: Worlds

Assignments

• Read the XP book.
• HW4, Part 1: Implementing the State of the World.
• HW4, Part 2: Implementing Bugs.

Notes:

• ACM Programming Competition coming up. Anyone interested?

Overview:

• Philosophy of Ant
• Ant Basics
• Ant Variables

The Philosophy of Ant

• Problems with Make:
  • Painful syntax
  • Not targetted toward Java
  • Commands may be platform-dependent (the commands available on each platform, even with variants of *nix, will vary)
  • New "commands" are independent of Make
• The solution? Ant
  • XML syntax
  • Targetted toward Java
  • Platform-independent; everything implemented in Java
  • New "commands" are written in Java and attached to Ant

Some Ant Basics

• Ant commands typically go in a file called build.xml.
• XML is a lot like HTML, except with different tags (actually, you get to specify the tags in most cases, but not here).
  • Important difference: All tags must have "a matching tag". (Singleton tags have a slash before the right angle bracket.)
• Outermost tag: project
  • primary parameters: name, default
• Primary inner tags: target
  • primary parameters: name, depends, description
  • other possible parameters: if, unless
  • Within targets are tasks. Different tasks result in different actions.
  • Sample tasks: javac, java, javadoc, mkdir, echo
• In most systems, you can run ant with

  ant target
  

Variables in Ant

• Ant provides properties that act much like Make's variables.
• Properties are created with the property task.
• The most typical parameters are name and value
• One can instead just use file and load a set of properties form a file.
  • Each line of the file should be of the form name=value