Apache Ant Interview Questions

Apache Ant is a Java library and command-line tool for automating software build processes.It drives the processes or instructions described in build files as targets and extension points dependent upon each other.The main known usage of Ant is the build of Java applications. Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing to compile, assemble, test and run Java applications. Ant can also be used effectively to build non Java applications, for instance C or C++ applications. More generally, Ant can be used to pilot any type of process which can be described in terms of targets and tasks. Source: http://ant.apache.org/

Ant is written in Java.

Java 1.5 is required for Apache Ant 1.9.x.

Ant tool is used for:-

• Compiling Java code into bytecode
• Placing this bytecode in a package
• Deployment to production systems
• Document creation and release notes preparation.

Use below code snippet to set Classpath in Ant script

<path id="build.classpath">
<fileset dir="${build.lib}" includes="**/*.jar"/>
<fileset dir="${build.class"}/>
</path>

<target….>
<javac….>
<classpath field="build.classpath"/>
</javac>
</target>

<target….>
<javac….>
<classpath field="build.classpath"/>
</javac>
</target>