Apache ant write file

Follow the steps mentioned below for this sample example. Create a directory and name it to antfirstexample in any of your local drive.

Everything will go inside this directory like: source files, created output files, and the build file. By convention, all Ant build files should be called build. If you're not familiar with XML syntax, I recommend you read up a little on it first, so you know what elements, attributes, tags, closing tags, and comments look like.

It's very similar to HTML syntax. But more formal You know XML? Let's break this down line-by-line:. The graphical view of the XML Tree of the build file is given below. The graphical view of the XML tree makes it easier to look at a build file, and so the structure of the build file should become more clear. At the top of the tree is a element, which has two attributes, name and default. All Ant build files must contain a single element as the root element.

For this reason, entire debug logs, Ant build scripts or most preferably little demo projects attached to the issue are very much appreciated. Of course, patches are welcome, too. Contributors can check out the project from our source repository and will find supplementary information in the guide to helping with Maven. Last Published: Version: 2. Maven Ant Tasks Note: This component is retired. After finishing the Java-only step we have to think about our build process.

We have to compile our code, otherwise we couldn't start the program. Oh— start —yes, we could provide a target for that. We should package our application. Now it's only one class—but if you want to provide a download, no one would download several hundreds files A startable jar file would be nice And it's a good practise to have a clean target, which deletes all the generated stuff.

Many failures could be solved just by a "clean build". By default Ant uses build. While having a look at the buildfile, we will see some similar steps between Ant and the Java-only commands:. Now that we have a working buildfile, we could do some enhancements: many times you are referencing the same directories, main-class and jar-name are hardcoded, and while invoking you have to remember the right order of build steps.

Somebody told us not to use System -statements. We use Log4J for that, because. We store our external libraries in a new directory lib. Log4J can be downloaded [1] from Logging's Homepage. Create the lib directory and extract the log4j Dependencies are denoted using the depends attribute.

Adds the target to the dependency list of the specified Extension Point. An Extension Point is similar to a target, but it does not have any tasks. The echo task in the above example is a trivial task that prints a message. In our example,it prints the message Hello World. To run the ant build file, open up command prompt and navigate to the folder, where the build. You could also type ant instead. Both will work,because info is the default target in the build file.