Ant Katas

So I'm continuing to pick up programming skills. This week, I played around with Ant.

Ant is a build system for Java projects, like make is for C projects. Like all build systems, its primary function is to let you write scripts that intelligently compile the source code files in your project. But it lets you do a lot more than that. Directories referenced in a build script can be relative to the project's directory, meaning its easy to transport the whole project to a different system without having it break. Ant handles any differences across OS environments, such as whether the local system uses \ or / as the path separator. You can write scripts to automate other tasks, such as running test cases, executing other tools like as javadoc, or cleaning up stray files. The scripts can also test conditions in the local environment and adapt their behavior accordingly. When combined with Ivy, Ant can also do dependency management for you, downloading any 3rd party libraries required by your project. In short, Ant lets you automate a lot of routine programming tasks for a specific project. And it does this in a transportable way, across OS environments, so that anyone else who downloads your project can perform those task out-of-the-box too.

To get some practice writing Ant scripts (which are specified in XML), I went through a few katas for a simple Hello, World program. The Ant tasks involved compiling, cleaning, generating javadocs, and packaging the system for distribution.

What I learned from this is that the Ant Manual takes a bit of getting used to. It provides a decent tutorial, but it can be hard to use as a reference. For example, the manual includes a extensive list of all the possible task tags that Ant supports, including documentation of all the attributes they support. But for a while, the only place I could find a link to this important list was an in-text link buried in text of the "Using Ant -> Tasks" manual section. (In writing this post, I found there is a more direct link under Ant Tasks in the Table of Contents, but this is easy to overlook because its location between "Running Apache Ant" and "Concepts and Types" makes it look like a tutorial chapter title.)

I had a bit of trouble using Eclipse write these scripts. Eclipse has a special Ant editor which provides some helpful syntax highlighting and content assistance. However, I couldn't find a way to create an Ant file directly. Instead, I had to create a normal XML file, then right-click on it and open it in the Ant Editor (which required some browsing to find among the various editor options). Once opened there, it was possible to just hit the run button to run the Ant script, which was handy. And I only had to do this once for each file; after that, Eclipse remembered that it was an Ant file.

So I've covered the basics of Ant at this point. I'd like to mess around with filesets and paths a bit more. When I get a minute, I'd also like to figure out how to exclude Eclipse contents (such as the /bin directory and .project file) from distribution zips I build with Ant. Then, since I'm still learning Eclipse too, I want to see how Eclipse handles importing projects that don't have any Eclipse metadata included.