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Since there are no conventions, just knowing Ant doesn't mean we'll quickly understand any Ant build file. Consequently, this means that Ant requires developers to write all the commands by themselves, which sometimes leads to huge XML build files that are hard to maintain. Ant doesn't impose any coding conventions or project structures. The main benefit of Ant is its flexibility. After that, the target compile will recreate the directory and compile the src folder into it. This will trigger the target clean first which will delete the “classes” directory. For example, we can compile the code by running: ant compile This build file defines four targets: clean, compile, jar and run. Here is an example of a build.xml file for a simple Java project with the HelloWorld main class:
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Ant build files are written in XML, and by convention, they're called build.xml.ĭifferent phases of a build process are called “targets”. In many aspects, Ant is very similar to Make, and it's simple enough so anyone can start using it without any particular prerequisites.
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