Use Apache Ant With The UK's Leading Experts At JBI Training

Why Come to JBI Training for an Apache Ant Automated Building Tool Course?

Client feedback shows that delegates on our courses will best engage when they can relate course topics to their own day-to-day practices and requirements. Where possible, we  run this course as a consultative, workshop-style event, in which discussion of relevant topics takes place in relation to the delegates' own applications and scenarios.

To facilitate this type of event, a subject matter expert leads the training, hands-on labs and discussions to ensure course topics are covered in a meaningful, relevant and timely manner. Delegates may be able to bring their own practical requirements and work to the course if the subjects and course topics are suitable.

Course Overview

What you will learn

• Describe the differences between Ant and other build tools
• Create a basic build.xml file from scratch
• Working with embedded properties and external properties using properties files
• Integrate ANT with your IDE
• Modify the build file to execute common tasks, like unit tests, jar, etc.
• Modify the build file the integrate the build process with a version control system like SVN
• Describe the capabilities of extending Ant through custom tasks

Course Detail

Introduction to Ant

• What is Ant
• How did we get here
• Ant and other build tools 

Installing Ant

• System requirements
• Getting the software
• “installing the software”
• Dealing with library dependencies
• Gotchas on different platforms

Building hello world with Ant

• A simple hello world Java application
• A quick and dirty build file
• Command line options
• Environment variables and system properties

Ant concepts and terminologies

• Projects
• Targets
• Properties
• Working with Built in properties
• Adding polish to ‘quick and dirty’ build file

Working with Ant

• Filters
• Pathing
• References
• Logging

Ant Tasks

• Archive Tasks
• File Tasks
• Compile Tasks
• Execution Tasks
• Properties Tasks

Integrating ANT into your IDE

Automating your build and testing through Ant tasks

• Testing Tasks
• Ant and continuous integration servers
• Archiving Tasks
• Deployment tasks
• Integrating Ant with a version control system

Creating Custom Ant tasks