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Ant in Action: Covers Ant 1.7 (Manning)

Ant in Action: Covers Ant 1.7 (Manning)
By Steve Loughran, Erik Hatcher

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Product Description

This second edition of a Manning bestseller has been revised and re-titled to fit the 'In Action' Series by Steve Loughran, an Ant project committer. "Ant in Action" introduces Ant and how to use it for test-driven Java application development. Ant itself is moving to v1.7, a major revision, at the end of 2006 so the timing for the book is right. A single application of increasing complexity, followed throughout the book, shows how an application evolves and how to handle the problems of building and testing. Reviewers have praised the book's coverage of large-projects, Ant's advanced features, and the details and depth of the discussion-all unavailable elsewhere.

This is a major revision with the second half of the book completely new, including:
How to Manage Big projects Library management Enterprise Java Continuous integration Deployment Writing new Ant tasks and datatypes

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #105734 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-07-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 566 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Loughran designs and builds production Web Services using Java and Ant. Prior to this, he was a research scientist in Hewlett Packard Laboratories in England.


Erik Hatcher, one of the original Lucene in Action authors, is a committer on the Ant, Lucene, and Tapestry open-source projects, and coauthor of Manning's award-winning Java Development with Ant.

Customer Reviews

More than just Ant5

A 500+ page book about a build tool. I guess your initial reaction might be the same as mine. Why would we need so much pages to describe a build tool.

Well, after reading "Ant in Action" I concluded, it doesn't need. The book just described much more than just Ant.

The book consists of three parts. The first part is called "Learning Ant". This is basically the build tool part, which describes the basics of Ant and how to use it. Well actually, in part one it already goes a little further to also include unit testing and already some deployment related information.

The second part is called "Applying Ant" and goes well beyond just describing Ant. Chapter 10 describes working in large projects. Chapter 11 talks about managing dependencies and introduces Ivy. Chapter 15 introduces continuous integration and introduces Luntbuild (not sure why the authors not chose to describe CruiseControl, which is absolutely the most used CI tool). Chapter 16 alone would already be a reason to get the book and it talks about automating deployment and introduces a tool called Smartfrog.

The third parts is called "extending ant" and explains how you can extend ant, develop your own tasks and test them using AntUnit. It describes how ant is implemented so that you know how to extend it (and probably how to develop for it further).

When I started my journey through this book, I was a simple Ant user. The authors showed me that there are so much things possible with Ant and also explored the world around Ant. After finishing the book, I felt I have learned so much and it certainly improved my build scripting abilities. An absolute must read.

The definitive guide to building Java systems5
Ant in Action is essential reading for anyone who has to set up a Java build, or manage and maintain large projects.

I've been waiting for this to leave the printers for a while - I was lucky enough to read a pre-release copy of Ant in Action, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It carefully walks through the setup for a basic build system, and evolves that to managing large scale projects, explaining as it goes how modern versions of Ant and its features (such as macrodef and import) work to handle larger and larger codebases. It's a hugely detailed, but well written book.

The title doesn't do justice to the material covered. Ant in Action is also a catalog of best practices for building, testing and deploying Java systems - I don't think there's another book in print that provides the kind of information you can find here. Dependency management, source layout, testing, master builds, packaging, deployment, web development - it's all there.

creating a good build process4
"Ant in Action" is really the second edition of "Java Development in Ant." I think the original title was more descriptive as the book focuses more on process, tools and techniques than most Ant books. For example, they introduce continuous integration and why you would want to write unit tests. Not that the Ant coverage isn't good - it's excellent - just that the book is so much more. The book assumes you know Java, but walks you through everything else.

Like most Ant books the authors don't rehash the excellent online manual and API. For those new to Ant, features are clearly described with good examples and good descriptions of "what happens if ____." The flow diagrams helped visualize concepts nicely.

For those who have been using Ant, there are margin notes about what was added in 1.6/1.7 along with coverage of Ivy. I also liked the Java 6/JEE 5 examples. The techniques for writing reusable/maintainable code and extending Ant provided significant value. I was a little disappointed that the JUnit examples used JUnit 3.8. The authors did explain the reasoning and I understand their reason. I still would have liked to see it though as this book will still be used when JUnit 4 is in wider use.

Coverage of related tools is also useful. It's good to know what libraries to look into to increase productivity with Ant. I've been using Ant for complex builds for three years and still had a page of take away points from this book. I recommend it for the valuable information and techniques.