Preface to the First Edition
In early 2000, Steve took a sabbatical from HP Laboratories, taking a break from research into such areas as adaptive, context-aware laptops to build web services, a concept that was very much in its infancy at the time.
He soon discovered that he had entered a world of chaos. Business plans, organizations, underlying technologies—all could be changed at a moment’s notice. One technology that remained consistent from that year was Ant. In the Spring of 2000, it was being whispered that a “makefile killer” was being quietly built under the auspices of the Apache project: a new way to build Java code. Ant was already in use outside the Apache Tomcat group, its users finding that what was being whispered was true: it was a new way to develop with Java. Steve started exploring how to use it in web service projects, starting small and slowly expanding as his experience grew and as the tool itself added more functionality. Nothing he wrote that year ever got past the prototype stage; probably the sole successful deliverable of that period was the “Ant in Anger” paper included with Ant distributions.
In 2001, Steve and his colleagues did finally go into production. Their project—to aggressive deadlines—was to build an image-processing web service using both Java and VB/ASP. From the outset, all the lessons of the previous year were applied, not just in architecture and implementation of the service, but in how to use Ant to manage the build process. As the project continued, the problems expanded to cover deployment to remote servers, load testing, and many other challenges related to realizing the web service concept. It turned out that with planning and effort, Ant could rise to the challenges.
Meanwhile, Erik was working at eBlox, a Tucson, Arizona, consulting company specializing in promotional item industry e-business. By early 2001, Erik had come to Ant to get control over a build process that involved a set of Perl scripts crafted by the sysadmin wizard. Erik was looking for a way that did not require sysadmin effort to modify the build process; for example, when adding a new JAR dependency. Ant solved this problem very well, and in the area of building customized releases for each of eBlox’s clients from a common codebase. One of the first documents Erik encountered on Ant was the infamous “Ant in Anger” paper written by Steve; this document was used as the guideline for crafting a new build process using Ant at eBlox.
At the same time, eBlox began exploring Extreme Programming and the JUnit unit-testing framework. While working on JUnit and Ant integration, Erik dug under the covers of Ant to see what made it tick. To get JUnit reports emailed automatically from an Ant build, Erik pulled together pieces of a MIME mail task submitted to the antdev team. After many dumb-question emails to the Ant developers asking such things as “How do I build Ant myself?” and with the help of Steve and other Ant developers, his first contributions to Ant were accepted and shipped with the Ant 1.4 release.
In the middle of 2001, Erik proposed the addition of an Ant Forum and FAQ to jGuru, an elegant and top-quality Java-related search engine. From this point, Erik’s Ant knowledge accelerated rapidly, primarily as a consequence of having to field tough Ant questions. Soon after that, Erik watched his peers at eBlox develop the well-received Java Tools for Extreme Programming book. Erik began tossing around the idea of penning his own book on Ant, when Dan Barthel, formerly of Manning, contacted him. Erik announced his book idea to the Ant community email lists and received very positive feedback, including from Steve who had been contacted about writing a book for Manning. They discussed it, and decided that neither of them could reasonably do it alone and would instead tackle it together. Not to make matters any easier on himself, Erik accepted a new job, and relocated his family across the country while putting together the book proposal. The new job gave Erik more opportunities to explore how to use Ant in advanced J2EE projects, learning lessons in how to use Ant with Struts and EJB that readers of this book can pick up without enduring the same experience. In December of 2001, after having already written a third of this book, Erik was honored to be voted in as an Ant committer, a position of great responsibility, as changes made to Ant affect the majority of Java developers around the world.
Steve, meanwhile, already an Ant committer, was getting more widely known as a web service developer, publishing papers and giving talks on the subject, while exploring how to embed web services into devices and use them in a LAN-wide, campus-wide, or Internet-wide environment. His beliefs that deployment and integration are some of the key issues with the web service development process, and that Ant can help address them, are prevalent in his professional work and in the chapters of this book that touch on such areas. Steve is now also a committer on Axis, the Apache project’s leading-edge SOAP implementation, so we can expect to see better integration between Axis and Ant in the future.
Together, in their “copious free time,” Erik and Steve coauthored this book on how to use Ant in Java software projects. They combined their past experience with research into side areas, worked with Ant 1.5 as it took shape—and indeed helped shape this version of Ant while considering it for this book. They hope that you will find Ant 1.5 to be useful—and that Java Development with Ant will provide the solution to your build, test, and deployment problems, whatever they may be.