Building with Ant

Ant is a build tool for Java developed by the Jakarta Project. It is an extensible command line tool that that makes it fairly trivial to build Java applications. I've mostly been using it to avoid tying myself to an IDE, but still avoid writing Makefiles, which can be needlessly tedious for Java.

Installing and using Ant

• Ant requires an XML parser that supports Java API for XML (JAXP). The easiest thing to use is Project X, a parser from Sun.
• You build Ant yourself, if you like, using source from the Jakarta CVS archive. For build directions, see Building Ant in docs/index.html.
• Installing Ant fairly straight forward.
  • Add jaxp.jar and parser.jar from Project X to your class path.
  • Set JAVA_HOME to the directory the JDK is installed in. (which you should have done anyway)
  • Set ANT_HOME to the directory where Ant is installed.
  • Add ANT_HOME/bin to your path.
  For example set

  JAVA_HOME=/usr/java1.2
  CLASSPATH=${CLASSPATH}:/usr/local/jaxp1.0/jaxp.jar:/usr/local/jaxp1.0/parser.jar
  ANT_HOME=/usr/local/ant
  PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin
  export JAVA_HOME CLASSPATH ANT_HOME PATH
  	

• To run ant, just type

  ant
  	

  to build the default target or

  ant target
  	

  to build some other target.

For more details on running ant, writing build files, built in tasks, writing your own tasks, see the Ant documentation. If you build new tasks, you may also want to read the API docs.

Drew Sudell Last modified: Thu Apr 18 12:19:36 EDT 2002