Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

1.1. Getting an Ant Distribution

If you're not already using Ant to manage the building, testing, running, and packaging of your Java projects, now is the time to start. The examples in this book are Ant driven, so you'll need a working Ant installation to follow along and experiment with variations on your own system, which is the best way to learn.

First of all, get an Ant binary and install it.

1.1.1. Why do I care?

We chose to structure our examples around Ant for several reasons. It's convenient and powerful, it's increasingly (almost universally) the standard build tool for Java-based development, it's free and it's cross-platform. Many of the example and helper scripts in the current Hibernate distribution are Windows batch files, which don't do any good for people like me who live in a Unix world. Using Ant means our examples can work equally well anywhere there's a Java environment, which means we don't have to frustrate or annoy any readers of this book. Happily, it also means we can do many more cool things with less effort—especially since several Hibernate tools have explicit Ant support, which we'll show how to leverage.

I used to wonder why people bothered with Ant when they could use Make. Now that I've seen how well it manages Java builds, I feel lost without it.

To take advantage of all this, you need to have Ant installed and working on your system.

1.1.2. How do I do that?

Download a binary release of Ant from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi. Scroll down to find ...