Introduction

Eclipse is a great Java IDE, and it excels at enabling you to edit, debug, share, compile, and run your code. However, advanced projects can demand more from the build process. For example, you might want to compile multiple files, copy your compiled files to a specific location, create .jar files, delete previous build files, and more.

All these things are possible with the well-known Ant build tool from Apache (see http://ant.apache.org/). Ant has a great deal of power built in. It enables you to automate the build process—compile, move, copy, and delete files, create and delete directories, and more. And now Ant comes built into Eclipse. If your project requires more than just compiling one or two files, this is the chapter for you.

This chapter discusses how to use Ant from Eclipse, but it doesn't discuss how to use Ant in detail, which would take a book by itself. For more information on how to work with this tool, see Ant: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly).