Ant tool?

[Charlie Swanson]

Hello,
I am just getting started with J2EE. I am using something called Ant. I have the path set up to find the ant bin directory. ANT_HOME points to the ant top ant directory. The classpath is set up for the bin and library directories.
Can you explain how to run ant?

[Rick Salsa]

Hi Charlie,
You'll need to create an xml file and name it build.xml. Inside there you'll specify targets, like compile, etc..
These target will call commands called tasks to do different things. Take a look at the ant documentation for examples.
Once this is done, make sure your in the directory that contains the build.xml file. At the prompt, type in ant. That should run the file for you.
If you have any other questions, let me now. You might want to look the Jakarta Forum here at the ranch. A lot of questions on ant get posted there..
HTH,
/rick

[Simon Brown]

Ant is excellent, but quite complex to get into ... moving this to the Jakarta Projects forum.

[sandy gupta]

Hey Charlie,
In your ANT bin directory there is an exe file called ant/ant2, dunno what but u can chk and all u have to do is call that from the cmd line, pass the name of the ant file that u want to run, (generally u write a main.xml that calls all the ant files that u want to run) and also pass the source for the classes that u want to compile/copy in the arguments(if u have specified any in your dtd, generally there is a SOURCE_HOME)
e.g
D:\ant\bin\ant2 -buildfile main.xml -DSOURCE_HOME=D:\ant\build
Please mail me at [email protected] if you need any more info
HTH
Sahil

[sandy gupta]

By exe i meant an executable batch/command file

[Thomas Paul]

Might I recommend this article written by one of the JavaRanch Sheriffs?
http://www.javaranch.com/newsletter/Mar2002/newslettermar2002.jsp#ant