Appendix C. Spring DM development with Ant and Ivy
We consciously chose to use Maven 2 throughout this book, mainly because that’s the build tool we’re the most familiar with, but also because Spring DM uses it for its own building and testing. Nevertheless Ant remains a very popular build tool, so here we’ll provide enough information for you to get started with OSGi and Spring DM development using Ant.
The aim of this appendix is to reproduce part of what we did in chapter 3, but in an Ant and Ivy fashion: writing and packaging a Spring-powered bundle, then running the corresponding integration test. We won’t focus on pure Spring DM topics—you should already be familiar with the core principles of Spring DM before reading this appendix.
Why would you want to use Ant instead of Maven 2? There are many reasons, the first being that Ant is your favorite build tool! Generally speaking, Ant can address complex builds, because it lets the user handle very technical tasks, whereas Maven 2 has a more declarative approach.
We’ll start with the installation of Ant, and then dive into writing the bundle itself and compiling it with Ant. We’ll then cover how to create an OSGi bundle using Bnd, which integrates nicely with Ant. Apache Ivy will help us handle our dependencies, and we’ll see how to customize Spring DM’s testing framework to make it work with Ivy. We’ll finish by writing and running the integration test with Ant.