Ant Developer’s Handbook

Summary

We’ve covered a ton of material in this chapter. I hope that you’ll come away from this chapter with a better appreciation for how much drudgery Ant can automate for you. If you had to do all the steps we performed in this chapter by hand, it would take forever and would be so tedious you’d hate to have to do it. Similarly, if you had to create batch files or shell scripts, it would be easier than the manual method, but still problematic and tedious. Contrast that with the build file we’ve constructed. Although it might seem like a lot of work to get to this point, after you get used to Ant’s build file structure, the common attributes, and your frequently used tasks, this will become old hat. I’ve been using Ant religiously for about ...