Ant – Vinay Keshava

Documentation

Java

Ant

Apache Ant, is Java based make tool, which process according to the build commands given in build.xml. Ant is mainly used for Java applications, which can be used to run,compile and package java software. Configuration for the build is done in build.xml file. Software projects looking for build tool and dependency management can use Ant.

Simple Hello World project enabling Ant build system for the Hello World project. Pre-requisties are to install openjdk and ant build system.

HelloWorld.java

$ cat src/HelloWorld.java 
public class HelloWorld{
	public static void main(String []args){
		System.out.println("Hello World");
		System.out.println("Vinay Keshava");
   }
	}

The conventional way to run the above simple HelloWorld.java is using javac and java.

$ javac HelloWorld.java

$ java HelloWorld
Hello World
Vinay Keshava

In order to simplify the processing of building and running the java code, we use build systems like Apache Ant,Maven and Gradle. Here lets create a simple build.xml file for the above HelloWorld.java using Ant build system.

$ tree
.
├── build.xml
└── src
    └── HelloWorld.java

1 directory, 2 files

Create a project where the source within the src directory and build.xml within the root directory having the contents.

build.xml

<project>
    <target name="clean">
        <delete dir="build"/>
    </target>
    <target name="compile">
        <mkdir dir="build/classes"/>
        <javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/classes"/>
    </target>
    <target name="jar">
        <mkdir dir="build/jar"/>
        <jar destfile="build/jar/HelloWorld.jar" basedir="build/classes">
            <manifest>
                <attribute name="Main-Class" value="HelloWorld"/>
            </manifest>
        </jar>
    </target>
    <target name="run">
        <java jar="build/jar/HelloWorld.jar" fork="true"/>
    </target>
</project>

A simple xml file having tags like targets where the operations are defined, here we have three target types compile,jar,run. In compile phase a directory called build/classes is created, and destination directory is set.

vinay@falcon:/tmp/ant-sample$ ant compile
Buildfile: /tmp/ant-sample/build.xml

compile:
    [mkdir] Created dir: /tmp/ant-sample/build/classes
    [javac] /tmp/ant-sample/build.xml:9: warning: 'includeantruntime' was not set, 
	defaulting to build.sysclasspath=last; set to false for repeatable builds
    [javac] Compiling 1 source file to /tmp/ant-sample/build/classes

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds
vinay@falcon:/tmp/ant-sample$ ant jar
Buildfile: /tmp/ant-sample/build.xml

jar:
    [mkdir] Created dir: /tmp/ant-sample/build/jar
      [jar] Building jar: /tmp/ant-sample/build/jar/HelloWorld.jar

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds
vinay@falcon:/tmp/ant-sample$ ant run
Buildfile: /tmp/ant-sample/build.xml

run:
     [java] Hello World
     [java] Vinay Keshava

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds

All the above three commands can be run simultaneously, ant compile jar run where the code is compiled,packaged and run.

Compile : a directory build/classes is created, source directory is set with javac command tag.
Jar : creating a directory build/jar,where the jar is stored.
Run : running the HelloWorld.jar file.

Java 17 Features