FAQs

Two Bad Ants In this story, Chris Van Allsburg describes the world from the point of view of a colony of ants. Intent on getting their queen all the sweet sugar she wants, they raid the sugar jar of a home. But two ants decide to hang back and stay in the sugar. They do not know what life is like in a kitchen for two ants! Tossed from the. Evolution In Action: Native U.S. Lizards Are Adapting To Escape Attacks By Fire Ants ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2009) Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Tracy Langkilde has shown that native fence lizards in the southeastern United States are adapting to potentially fatal invasive fire-ant.

At Apache Ant™'s website

Starting with the release of Apache Ant 1.4 the Ant's FAQ is bundled with the distribution, the most recent version can always be found at the website.

jGuru

jGuru hosts an interactive Ant discussion forum and FAQ system

WIKIs

Apache

The ASF provides a Wiki farm for Apache projects.

Books

The most recent books come first

Ant in Action

Published April/May 2007, and covering Ant 1.7.

This is a major rewrite of the first edition; still 600 pages long.

This book moves up from Ant1.5 to Java1.5 and 1.7, with a near-complete rewrite of the applied-ant section, covering new topics such as antlibs, repository management with Ivy, Xml Schema validation, EJB3.0/Java EE development and advanced deployment using SmartFrog. The ant coding section looks at AntUnit, antlib authoring and scripting languages, while the beginners chapters, the first third of the book, still shows developers how to build, test, package and redistribute a Java application.

If you are one of the 20,000+ owners of the first edition, it is now obsolete. Sorry :)

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd edition

Published April 2005, and covers Ant release 1.6.1.

This is a complete rewrite of the first edition; this book is now 290 pages and so covers Ant in more depth than its predecessor.

It also mixes reference information (tables) with text explanation on how to use the tasks. Contents includes JUnit, CVS, execution, basic deployment, Web application development and XDoclet. There is also coverage of XDoclet, and a chapter on how to extend Ant in Java.

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Extreme Programming with Ant

This book shows how to implement an XP project using Ant 1.5.3, and many other 3rd party tools. Covers:

• The fundamentals of Ant: concepts, core and optional tasks
• How to write custom Ant components, including custom Tasks, Loggers, Listeners, Input Handlers, Selectors, Filters, Mappers and Data Types
• Mitigating risks by creating spike tests with Ant buildfiles
• Add CVS version control and testing with JUnit
• Automate nightly builds and reporting
• Deploy applications dynamically using XDoclet
• Enforcing Code Standards with Jalopy, PMD, CheckStyle, iContract, JDepend
• Using Remote Ant (Rant) and CruiseControl
• Generating project documentation
• Adapting an XP process for use by other teams or across an enterprise
• Custom Task examples to generating UML diagrams, creating reports and metrics on-the-fly
• Follows a case-study of a team that implements an XP Project

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Ant. Das Java-Build-Tool in der Praxis

A German language book on Ant that covers Ant 1.5. This is the original description:

Some topics:

• creating archives (zip, jar)
• call the java compiler
• edit property files
• file operation
• source code control systems

The book is available in English as 'Ant: The Java Build Tool in Practice'

Ant In Action Pdf Example

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Java Development with Ant

Published 2002. This book covers Ant 1.5, including:

• The new Ant 1.5 features
• Ant's datatypes and property handling
• JUnit testing and reporting
• Continuous integration techniques
• XDoclet for attribute-oriented programming
• EJB generation, building, and packaging
• Writing and testing native code
• Building Web Services with Apache Axis
• Deploying your system to multiple remote servers
• Using and writing
  • Loggers
  • Listeners
  • Selectors
  • Custom tasks

Also available in Korean and German editions

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Ant: The Definitive Guide, 1st edition

Published 2002, Covers Ant release 1.4.1.

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Ant. Kurz und Gut.

A German language short reference for Ant that covers Ant 1.4. This is the original description:

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Java Tools for eXtreme Programming

This book covers the following XP subjects:

• Automated unit and functional testing
• Continuous integration through build and deployment automation
• The value of refactoring and continuous integration
• How Ant, JUnit, JUnitPerf, Cactus, HTTPUnit, and JMeter can be used to achieve the goals of the XP methodology

Available from:
Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense | Powells.com

Articles and Presentations

The following sections list articles and presentations written about Apache Ant. If you've written something that should be included, please post it to one of the mailing lists.

Articles

Extending Ant Input Abilities

Ant In Action Pdf Download

The contents of this document is the following:

• Section 2 provides a simple example how InputHandlers are created,
• Section 3 develops an inputhandler that masks the passwords typed on the command line,
• Section 4 gives two handlers, whose input is typed in graphical components,
• Section 5 extends Input task so that we can use dierent input handlers on different uses of <input>,
• Section 6 describes a problem found while writing this document,
• Section 7 summarizes some dark corners the author do not understand.

Ant 1.6 for Task Writers

This article talks about XML namespace handling, Ant libraries and the newly introduced type polymorphism.

New Ant 1.6 Features for Big Projects

This article describes the <macrodef>, <import> and <subant> tasks in detail and shows how they help in building bigger systems.

Programmieren für Ant

This article describes the main topics of programming your own tasks. Description is done on five examples.

This article is written in German and published in Java-Spektrum 5/2004.

Ant In Action Pdf Free

Ant in Anger: Using Ant in a Production Development System

This document describes strategies and some basic examples of how to use Ant in larger team development projects.

Ant Task Guidelines

This document describes how to write custom Ant tasks, and how to submit them to potentially be included in Ant.

Automate your build process using Java and Ant

This article provides an introduction to using Ant with some basic examples and by highlighting some of the important tasks.

Using Ant and Weblogic EJBs

This article describes how to use Ant to create Weblogic EJBs, and some workarounds for issues you may encounter.

Developing with JAXB and Ant

Ant In Action Pdf

Series of articles that shows how to use Ant together with the Java API for XML Binding (JAXB).

Ant In Action Pdf Template