Ant: The Definitive Guide

Appendix B. Ant Solutions

Over time, developers have created good, consistent solutions for builds. Unfortunately, many of these solutions remain “locked away” within their projects’ buildfiles and rarely find light in articles or documentation. In Chapter 3, we organize the irssibot project in a manner that has proven successful with many other projects. Like these other projects, our example project closely ties the buildfile to file and directory organization. Due to the rather simple nature of the irssibot project, we are unable to demonstrate some other successful build designs such as those found in projects like Tomcat, the Jakarta Taglibs, and the Ant project. In this Appendix, however, we get a chance to discuss these other common build solutions as well as to clarify the ones we use in other parts of the book.

We should note that the following solutions are not patterns in the academic sense. To emphasize this difference, we’ve broken the solutions down into sections and started each solution with a question. If you find the question fits a problem you’ve come across in writing buildfiles, read the solution to see if the suggestion fits your needs.

Testing Library Availability

Q: We use the Java SDK Version 1.4 for our Windows 2000 workstations, but our Linux boxes are still using Java SDK Version 1.2. Some of our classes use classes available only in Java SDK Version 1.4. Currently, this situation means we get build errors on the Linux machines. How do we prevent these ...