The Apache project has a large number of highly useful and popular projects. These range from platforms to languages to tools and utilities. In this tutorial, we take a look at Apache Ant. This scripting language and its library of tasks are far more powerful than you might expect.
A Focus on Software Development
Apache Ant is best used as a build and deployment tool. As such, the core tasks include the type of actions you expect for this phase of development. There are tasks to compile, compress, move and update files as well as some for testing and pushing database updates. However, like all Apache projects, this is a living tool that has been updated to work with the latest trends and includes version control integration, web application deployment, and automated documentation.
We start this tutorial with a few simple tasks and gradually move into more features that can make your personal coding productivity soar. In fact, Apache Ant can challenge you to automate nearly every step of your daily coding routine.
This series comes from our mentoring/mastermind classes. These classes are virtual meetings that focus on how to improve our technical skills and build our businesses. The goals of each member vary. However, this diversity makes for great discussions and a ton of educational value every time we meet. We hope you enjoy viewing this series as much as we enjoy creating it. As always, this may not be all new to you, but we hope it helps you be a better developer. Drop us a line to find out when the next one is so you can join our group.
Slide Deck: Ant Deep Dive
