winning the case for ANT 2004-10-15 - By Daniels, Doug
You can do any software task a million different ways, but using the
right tool can speed up development and maintenance time.
Ant is developed specifically for automated builds, deployment and unit
testing. Also to get everything you can out of Ant you really do need to
use the external tools that were developed for Ant especially
ant-contrib ( http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/)
There are some good articles discussing Ant (a bunch of articles can be
found here : http://ant.apache.org/resources.html )
Keep the Ant, Hold the XML
http://www.ftponline.com/javapro/2004_06/magazine/features/kgauthier/
(this might help out your colleague if he really doesn't want to script
in XML, then do it in Java and have it use the ANT API)
Ant in Anger:
http://ant.apache.org/ant_in_anger.html
New Ant 1.6 Features for Big Projects
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/bodewig_ant1.6.html
There are also some good books on using Ant effectively once you're
convinced them it's the correct tool (although they are out of date with
Ant 1.6, which provides a whole slew of new great features such as
<import> and <macrodef> that can allow you to create inheritance
hierarchies of builds, so you can reuse them and extend them, or at
least that's how I've been using it):
http://www.manning.com/hatcher/
Doug Daniels
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