Integrating other functionality in your build
If you want your build and deployment procedure to run automatically, you will typically use a continuous integration tool like Hudson (http://www.hudson-ci.org). This tool can run standalone, but you can also install it into your GlassFish server.
These tools support automatically checking out the latest version of your code from source control and running tasks (like the Ant scripts in this chapter). You can define triggers (for example, build automatically after every commit to Subversion) and add additional functionality like automatic unit tests.