3.1 Introduction

Ant is a portable, Java-based build tool designed to support software builds—and many other tasks—on any platform supporting Java. An XML file known as a buildfile specifies which tasks Ant follows when building your project. Ant ships with well over 100 tasks that perform operations ranging from compiling code to playing sound files when a build finishes. Java classes implement Ant tasks that can do anything Java can do. The Ant API is open and designed for extensibility; you can write your own custom tasks if the need arises.

A good build tool like Ant is critical to any successful XP implementation. You cannot expect a team of programmers to constantly refactor their code, run unit tests, and integrate their changes without a fast, predictable build environment. Consider the problems that occur when one of the programmers on a team has a newer version of a JAR file on his classpath. Unit tests may pass on his machine, but fail for everyone else. Ant helps avoid this sort of problem by clearly defining the files the project depends on, and the steps are followed to perform the build.

Build times must be kept to a minimum and Ant excels in this area. XP assumes that programmers write a lot of small, incremental pieces of code. Programmers must compile and run all unit tests after making each small change; therefore, the build needs to be fast. When builds are slow, programmers are discouraged from the constant refactoring and testing that XP demands. Ant helps performance in several ways:

• Most tasks only do their work if files are out of date. For example, code is only compiled when .java files are newer than their corresponding .class files.

• In most cases, individual build steps execute in the same JVM. Ant is written in Java and efficiently invokes many tools, such as the Java compiler, through direct method calls rather than spawning new processes.

• Ant tasks use a simple pattern-matching syntax to locate files quickly, allowing you to write buildfiles that perform work on the correct subset of a source tree for the job at hand.

Ant is available from the Apache Software Foundation at http://jakarta.apache.org/ant. Because Ant has so many tasks, the recipes in this chapter cannot describe them all. Instead, we show the most common aspects of Ant buildfiles followed by specific discussion of the tasks most directly related to XP.