Chapter 7. Distributing our application
This chapter covers:
Ant is now compiling, testing, and running our diary library. We can now do two things with the library: distribute it or deploy it. What does that mean? For us, distribution is the act of delivering a project’s artifact to one or more recipients. This delivery may be direct, via email or a shared file system, or it may be through a web site. Deployment is the problem of bringing up a functional application on a working computer, and is what often happens after distribution.
This chapter covers distribution; deployment is much harder. That may seem odd, but think about this: deployment includes bringing up the system and application to a working state. Distribution is just handing off the packaged code to someone else to get working. We’ll get to deployment in chapters 12, 14, and 16.
Ant is good at distribution, since it has tasks to handle the common activities. To explore these tasks, we’ll use Ant to distribute our application according to the following distribution activities.