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Notwithstanding a few minor shortcomings, I consider the book a worthwhile complement to Ant's freely available digital reference. Lacking preexisting knowledge, a reader may need to resort to outside sources for resolution. I found similar ambiguous statements more than once in different contexts. As an example, on page 109, the text states that "unforked compilation will lock files in the classpath, so you can't move or delete them later." This sentence may be read to mean that by using unforked compilation, (a) the configuration of the file system footprint of a project becomes unwieldy to the extent that it cannot be easily altered at a later time, or (b) creates operating system locks on the files, to the extent that they remain locked even after the end of compilation time, for as long as Ant is running. The closeness of the author to the details of Ant, however, occasionally produces unintended ambiguity that is not resolved in the book alone. The uneven style of the book, although occasionally distracting, allows the author to fill in some of the documentation holes of that digital reference.
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The book nicely complements the already well-structured reference library that is available with the Ant open-source distribution.
Apache ant books how to#
The last chapter, "Using the Ant API," shows how to use Ant programmatically as a code library, as opposed to declaratively via a build file. "Extending Ant" goes beyond that, showing how to enhance Ant itself if the need ever arises. "Writing Custom Tasks" covers Ant's plug-in model, including task life cycle, plug-in structure, and coding examples. Chapters 10, "Writing Custom Tasks," and 11, "Extending Ant," introduce the process of customizing Ant when what is provided out of the box is inadequate. These chapters could also be considered collections of best practices, while chapter 9, "Using Ant in Large Projects," aims to educate the reader on the best way to tailor Ant declarative programming for scalability. The following four chapters-"Building a Project," "Deploying an Application," "Running an Application," and "Testing an Application"-are a combination of user guide and cookbook styles, including customizable Ant recipes for various tasks. Part of chapter 3, and chapter 4, "Examining Ant's Types," read somewhat more like a reference, elaborating in great detail on certain configuration behaviors using a very dry and analytical style. The first two chapters, "Introducing Ant" and "Installing Ant," and to a lesser extent the third, "Using Ant," are written as tutorials, and are at times a little overbearing for a book with "Pro" in the title. To an extent, the book seems to suffer from a bit of an identity crisis, perhaps for good reason. The book covers its main use as a build tool extensively, as well as Ant's not-as-popular features related to extensibility and access via its programmatic application programming interface (API). Its most popular use is by means of declarative programming, where its build files are expressed in Extensible Markup Language (XML).
Apache ant books software#
Ant is an extensible software build tool written in Java.