KC Session on ANT

Lucas Jellema 3
0 0
Read Time:1 Minute, 49 Second

On Tuesday we had a very good session with the Knowledge Center for Web & Java on ANT, the Jakarta “make”-tool. We started with the usual roundup of everyones current activities and recent findings. We discussed the highlight in the area of Java/J2EE of the ODTUG 2004 and JavaOne 2004 conferences. Then Leon did an excellent job with an introduction to ANT, covering the basics and some interesting more advanced tasks. He demonstrated his use of ANT for local administration and also a number of AMIS usages of ANT on various projects. After the pizzas we did a small workshop with ANT 1.6.1. Starting with installation/configuration and the absolute basics, we quickly ended up in discussions on more exotic use for ANT. Hans was the first to implement his own ANT Task, which did absolutely nothing useful.

Some questions and ideas I took home from this session:

  • – ANT is seen as a tool to help organize your development environment and deployment process; however, for any batch process that is part of the application, there is probably not a better way to implement than ANT. For example the automatic letter generation process we implemented for a customer last year or the nightly website generation at another customer or loading of the dataware house from XML-files. All such tasks can very easily be ‘programmed’ in ANT.
  • – would it be possible to use ANT for more advanced (Struts-like) workflow by using return-values from a task (or target) to build conditional flow-logic. For example: a task can return values 0, 1, 2 (indicating e.g. success, failure and warning) Depending on the return value of the task, I would like to start either this or that task. I do not know whether that can be done

Other resources to look into:

About Post Author

Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema, active in IT (and with Oracle) since 1994. Oracle ACE Director and Oracle Developer Champion. Solution architect and developer on diverse areas including SQL, JavaScript, Kubernetes & Docker, Machine Learning, Java, SOA and microservices, events in various shapes and forms and many other things. Author of the Oracle Press book Oracle SOA Suite 12c Handbook. Frequent presenter on user groups and community events and conferences such as JavaOne, Oracle Code, CodeOne, NLJUG JFall and Oracle OpenWorld.
Happy
Happy
0 %
Sad
Sad
0 %
Excited
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
Angry
0 %
Surprise
Surprise
0 %

Average Rating

5 Star
0%
4 Star
0%
3 Star
0%
2 Star
0%
1 Star
0%

3 thoughts on “KC Session on ANT

  1. Have you figured out whether or not returning a value from a task can be done? I’m finding myself trying to do this exact thing right now.

Comments are closed.

Next Post

ADF Toystore Demo

Steve Muench published his ADF version of the Toystore Demo: see http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev/collateral/papers/10g/adftoystore.html. I have not yet tried it out but it should be a comprehensive example of using ADF for building a fairly complete application. For tips and background also see his weblog. Related posts: Tiger (Java 5.0) Generics, auto […]
%d bloggers like this: