ONJava.com: Developing for the Web with Ant, Part 1

ONJava.com: Developing for the Web with Ant, Part 1: "Developing for the Web with Ant, Part 1
by Steve Holzner

Editor's note: In part one of this two-part excerpt from Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition, author Steve Holzner covers packaging web applications. And stay tuned for part two next week, which covers the tasks for deploying web apps, including get, serverdeploy, and scp.

Developing for the Web is bread and butter for Ant developers. There is a wide spectrum of tasks at your disposal: Chapter 4 introduced packaging and deploying applications--including Web applications--with the move, copy, ftp, telnet, sshexec, and mail tasks, but Ant offers more. This chapter covers the tasks specifically designed for packaging Web applications, such as war, cab, ear, and jspc, and for deploying them, such as get, serverdeploy, and scp. I'll cover the custom Ant tasks targeted to specific servers such as deploy, reload, and undeploy. And there's more to come: Chapter 9 covers the many optional Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) tasks Ant supports."