Question

I’m about to create some complex Ant build files and I wanted find out what people think are best practices for naming ant tasks. It is going to build some Java, C++, compresses JavaScript, generate docs and lots more.

What tasks do you always add to an any script? Things like clean, build?

How to you name targets that make up a single target through dependencies (or don’t you do this)? E.g. build.proj1 and build.proj2

Any other naming conventions do you follow?

Answer 1

This link explains the typical targets you should have in your project.

Using standard targets helps with new team members (and any experienced Ant hands) quickly getting to grips with the build process.

From personal experience, I’d say clean, build, deploy/install, test (test for running your junits, findbugs etc)

For the dependent targets, we use a convention like below

<target name="build" depends="clean,compile">

<target name="compile" depends="compile.src, compile.test">