Scripting the build process

During the project, you will be building and deploying many times, so it makes sense to create scripts that handle this whole process. A good tool for handling this scripting is Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org).

Tip

Working with Maven and ADF

Oracle is improving the Maven support in JDeveloper in each version, and Maven is supported as a dependency-management and build tool in JDeveloper 12c. With built-in dependency tracking, Maven is very promising as a build tool for enterprise ADF applications using various ADF Libraries. However, in the version of JDeveloper that was currently used at the time of writing this book, using Maven as a build tool requires some tweaking.

Creating a build task

When working with Ant, you create a build file (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 that you might want your build process to achieve, for example, clean, init, compile...