Manning have released Java
Development with Ant, written by two Apache Ant project core developers, Erik Hatcher
and Steve Loughran, and including coverage of the new
features in Ant 1.5.
Ant is a cross-platform Java- and XML-based build tool
that the Apache Jakarta Project describes as "kind of
like Make, but without Make's wrinkles and with the full
portability of pure Java code".
Along with covering Ant basics (datatypes and
properties, testing with JUnit [full chapter available online 300KB PDF],
program execution, packaging, and deployment), Hatcher and
Steve Loughran devote an entire chapter to the specifics of
XML processing in the build -- from validating files
against local copies of DTDs to XSLT transforms of Ant
build logs themselves into readable HTML -- and another to
Web Services development [full chapter available online 250KB PDF],
showing how you can use Ant to deploy to Axis, and then how to "generate and run
unit tests against the endpoint, before going on to build
and run a .NET client from inside Ant for interoperability
testing".
The heart of the 630-page book focuses on topics related
to "solving hard software project problems", with chapters
devoted to:
The book closes with two chapters that provide details
about how to extend Ant with by writing custom tasks,
listeners, selectors and filters (the key ways to extend
Ant without making changes to the source), and with several
appendices, including a 60-page Ant task reference [full text available online 2.4MB
PDF].
Source code for the examples and related library files
are also available online.
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