concept Ivy in category java

This is an excerpt from Manning's book JUnit in Action, Second Edition. Login to get full access to this book.

Introducing Ant and Ivy

Apache Ivy^[6] is a popular open source dependency management tool (used for recording, tracking, resolving, and reporting dependencies), focusing on flexibility and simplicity. Although available as a standalone tool, Ivy works particularly well with Ant, providing a number of powerful Ant tasks ranging from dependency resolution to reporting and publication. It’s out of the scope of this book to cover Ivy in depth, but we rework our build file with dependency management using Ivy.

First, the root tag ivy-module defines the version of Ivy we want to use (in this case 2.0). Then, the info tag defines the organization and the module name for which we’re defining dependencies. Finally, the dependencies nested element is where we specify our dependencies. Our module has only one dependency listed: JUnit.

Invoking Ant again gives us the same result (figure 9.2) as when junit.jar was in the ${ANT_HOME}/lib folder, but this time we see Ivy invoked and resolve the project dependencies.

Figure 9.2. Ant output with Ivy at work