Ant: The Definitive Guide [Paperback]

Jesse Tilly (Author), Eric M. Burke (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596001843 | ISBN-13: 978-0596001841 | Publication Date: May 15, 2002 | Edition: 1st D

Ant is the premiere build management tool for use in Java environments. Unlike traditional build management tools such as GNU Make, Ant is itself written in Java, is platform independent, and interfaces well with the utilities in Sun's Java software development kit (SDK). In addition to being platform independent, Ant is also independent of the integrated development environment (IDE) being used. IDE independence is important for open source projects (or other projects) in which the various developers might use different IDEs. Using Ant, Java developers can:

• Define build chunks, the results that they must produce, and the dependencies between them
• Automatically retrieve source code from source control systems such as PVCS
• Build applications by having Ant compile the necessary source files in the proper order

Ant build files are written using XML-a well-established standard-so programmers using Ant are not required to learn yet another scripting language. They will likely already know XML, and will be able to leverage that knowledge. Ant is an open source project, and part of the Jakarta project. Jakarta is Sun's open source reference implementation for the JSP and Servlets specifications, and is part of the Apache group's work

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jesse is a developer with HotelTools, Inc. in Atlanta, GA. He has been working exclusively with BEA WebLogic developing and managing hospitality applications over the Internet. Eric Burke is a Senior Software Engineer with Object Computing, Inc. in St. Louis, MO. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and has a background in C++, Java, Unix, GUI development, and Web development. In addition to consulting/mentoring, Eric has teaching various Java, Object Oriented, and XML courses for the past four years. He currently acts as a mentor for three different clients on projects that are heavily utilizing Servlets, Swing, XML, XSLT, EJB, and CORBA.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st D edition (May 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596001843
• ISBN-13: 978-0596001841
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,154,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not worth your time., August 7, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Ant: The Definitive Guide (Paperback)

I'm very disappointed in this book and here's why.

1. Over half of the book is just a copy of the ANT 1.4.1 javadoc. Something which could be downloaded for free from the ANT website. The ANT commands documentation which you recieve when you download ANT goes into more detail then the javadoc.

2. It doesn't cover ANT 1.5 at all. It doesn't even get a mention, only ANT 1.4.1 and ANT2. Anyone starting off on ANT would more then likely be downloading the ANT 1.5 version and may find some of the information in the book incorrect or out of date.

3. The first part of the book deals with installing and compiling the sources. If the person is knowledgable to do this anyway they wouldn't need the book to tell them. If not they could just download the binaries and save themselves the heartache.

The only good parts where on building custom tasks and build listeners. Stuff which prior to Ant 1.5 wasn't documented that well. However that makes up very little of the book.

If you can read the ANT websites documentation fine you wouldn't need this book at all.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Definitive 'Waste of Money', February 12, 2003

By 

Dan Albarran (Bethesda, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ant: The Definitive Guide (Paperback)

Considering all the Ant build possibilities, this book barely scratches the service. Half the book is nothing more than the API in alphabetical order. I would have liked to see examples that incorporated the optional Ant jar (JUnit), complex EJB builds, deployment on 3rd party application servers like Weblogic, and strategies dealing with multiple wars but these were no where to be found. It would have been nice if there was more discussion on best practices. In addition, the book is poorly written and reads like it was written overnight.

This book should be titled "An introduction to Ant and nothing more." I only wished that I saved my receipt. Go read 'Java Development With Ant'. It is far more comprehensive and 'Definitive'. At first I gave this book 2 stars but after reviewing 'Java Development With Ant' I realized this book was more lacking than I thought. Don't make the same mistake I did!

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A cover on the online docs, August 26, 2002

By 

engrean (South Jordan, UT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ant: The Definitive Guide (Paperback)

I have developed some pretty complex build systems with Ant in my career. There is nothing you really can't do with Ant. Out of the box, it will do everything a basic build needs and the bundled documentation will teach you everything you need to know to get started and to develop very complex builds..

However, once in a while you'll find something that Ant doesn't do well or at all. Once you have committed to using it, you are pretty much bound to its limitations. The beauty of Ant is it is very customizable. The problem is none of the ways to customize Ant are very well documented in the public realm.

Basically, there are two major ways to customize Ant; to write a script, using the script task, or to write your own custom tag.

So be aware that my review is coming from a point of view where I expected an actual "Definitive Guide". To be short, I didn't get it. The script task is barely even mentioned in the book. They define what it is and that's all. At least with the bundled documentation they give a few examples. They spend only one chapter on custom tasks and they only cover the parts you can figure out via the bundled documentation.

For example, they use their own jar task to explain a task that would be used in the real world, but they don't bother to explain steps that aren't documented well in the Ant docs. To make things worse, they only show the parts of the example jar task source code that they are willing to explain. The rest is left out.

To be fair, I was able to better comprehend a few things about custom tasks through this book. However, the parts they left out were important enough that I had to hunt them down in the source code of already written Ant tasks anyway, thus defeating the purpose of buying this book. For those of you who aren't very familiar with Ant, the first few chapters explain the concepts of Ant better than the bundled documentation does.

In conclusion, if you are looking to learn Ant, download it and read the bundled documentation. If you like hard copies, then use your friendly printer. If you need the documentation explained a different way, you can always buy this book for a lot more than what it would cost to print out the bundled docs. They are basically the same thing except the bundled docs are a little more thorough and the book explains the concepts of Ant better.