Creating a build script

When working with Ant, you create a buildfile (traditionally called build.xml) to specify how to build a project. This XML file consists of a number of targets that define the different goals you might want your build process to achieve, for example clean, init, compile, test, or deploy. Within each target are a number of steps called tasks. Ant comes with a large number of pre-built tasks, and many tools that integrate with Ant supply their own tasks. If you are not already familiar with Ant, there are several books and many online resources available—for example, the online manual at http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html.

Tip

The version that is online at this URL applies to the latest version of Apache Ant—if you run the version included with JDeveloper, you are likely to be running a slightly older version.

You can run your Ant scripts from within JDeveloper by right-clicking on them and choosing either Run Ant Target or Debug Ant Target, like this:

You can also...