Chapter 10. Working with big projects

 

This chapter covers:

  • 10.1 Master builds: managing large projects
  • 10.2 Controlling child project builds
  • 10.3 Advanced delegation
  • 10.4 Inheriting build files through <import>
  • 10.5 Applying <import>
  • 10.6 Ant’s macro facilities
  • 10.7 Writing macros with <macrodef>
  • 10.8 Summary

Scalability is one of the classic challenges of software engineering. Every time you think you’ve solved it, the problem scales up: people expect even more the next time.

When this book introduced Ant, it started off with a small project—a diary library. As the chapters added more features, the project itself grew. It’s now becoming a big project, as we’re planning to use it in a web application. We now have the problem of scale to deal with, which is where this chapter comes to our aid. It looks at how to use Ant with big projects. That means projects that use multiple Ant build files to build different parts of a big system. Somehow, we want Ant to integrate those separate builds into one big application.

Building a large project is hard

10.1. Master builds: managing large projects

10.2. Controlling child project builds

10.3. Advanced delegation

10.4. Inheriting build files through <import>

10.5. Applying <import>

10.6. Ant’s macro facilities

10.7. Writing macros with <macrodef>

10.8. Summary