Java News Brief::OCI::November Issue

Java News Brief
November 2000 Issue

Headlines:
Java Technical Insight of the Month
     Ant - an open source, Java-based build tool
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Java Technical Insight of the Month
Ant - an open source, Java-based build tool
By Mark Volkmann, Principal Software Engineer, Object Computing, Inc. (OCI)

Ant was developed as part of the Apache Jakarta project. It is used to build many open source software packages such as Tomcat and JDOM. It can also be used to build your software.

There are many alternatives to building software.

perform the steps manually
use functionality built into an IDE
use make
use custom scripts

Performing the steps manually requires a lot of memorization and expertise. It is also error prone.

Using IDE functionality is fine if all the developers on a project are using the same IDE. Even then it's unusual that an IDE can perform all the build steps you need.

UNIX developers have been using make for a long time. It's a great tool but it has three problems.

doesn't run under Windows (unless Cygwin is installed)
has a cryptic syntax
doesn't provide any special support for Java development

Ant addresses all these issues. To learn more about Ant, click here.

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