I am working on an Java assignment for a software design course in my university. It’s not really complicated and it includes some classes, interfaces and jUnit test cases. We were now told we should supply a build.xml file as an input for an ant builder. I have never heard of, or used ant before. I also saw Eclipse supports it.
My questions are – What does build.xml do? How does Eclipse builds my project and why not do the same instead of using ant? And most important – how to create this file with Eclipse?
Thanks.
Ant is a build tool based on Java. It is very powerful, and integrates with various other tools you might need to build any imaginable Java application. It is very useful when deploying a Continunous Integration environment with a Continuous Build server.
You are building within Eclipse, and your build process is bound to your IDE – which is perfectly fine for a one-man project but might prove unefficient for a team project. Also, with Ant, you can have a complex build including multiple components and intricate dependencies done in a single step, including unit tests.
You can either create your Ant build from scratch (which is the best way, but it takes quite a while). Otherwise, you can create it with Eclipse using the File/Export menu (under General, select Ant buildfiles).