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A Little Ant Can Lighten the Load

If you are developing Java-based Web applications and you're still manually building and dragging and dropping files from one place to another, now is a good time to consider automating. Ant is an open source Java-based build tool that is available from the Apache Jakarta Project Web site. Ant differs from other build tools in several ways.

Since Ant is not OS dependent, you can develop one standard build file for your projects and then re-use this code for any similar projects, regardless of the platform. Because the tool is not married to any one platform, you can capitalize on the "write once, run anywhere" philosophy.

• Part 1 of our tutorial on using the Ant open source Java build tool discusses how you can use Ant for intranet development.

• Part 2 explores the supporting framework that should be in place behind the scenes in order to develop efficient, easy-to-maintain build files and supporting processes.

• Part 3 of the series explores how to deploy your application and pull all the pieces together to create one build file and a related batch file to meet your build and deployment needs.