Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

232Chapter 9Ant: An Introduction9.5REVIEWWe’ve taken a very quick tour through the most popular tool for building anddeploying Java applications. We’ve shown you how to install and set up ant.We’ve given you enough description of XML so that you can read an antbuildfile. We’ve touched briefly on the basic tags used in most buildfiles.9.6WHAT YOU STILL DON’T KNOWWhat we’ve covered here will probably explain most of the buildfiles you encounterin the wild. It will probably also give you what you need to know tobuild most of the buildfiles you will have to build. But we have left out afair amount.You can write your own tasks. That’s a biggie right there. There are manybuilt-in tasks that we didn’t cover. Look those up. They might be just whatyou need if you find yourself saying, “Boy, ant is nice, but I wish it coulddo X.” X might already be a built-in task. And if not, you can write it.Ant has datatypes that can often be used in place of the simple strings allowedin task attributes. Tasks and datatypes are instances of Java base classesdefined in the source code for ant. If you download the source, you can writeyour own classes that extend these base classes and you can thus add your owntags to ant.9.7RESOURCES• The Ant User’s Manual 12 at the Ant project homepage 13 (which itself ispart of the Apache Project 14 ) is the definitive resource for ant.12. http://ant.apache.org/manual/13. http://ant.apache.org/14. http://apache.org/