How to assemble a multi-project ant build system

Question

At my new gig, they use Ant and cannot be persuaded to move to Maven. I've looked everywhere for a decent example of how a multi-project ant build system should be assembled. The apache site falls short. I'm looking specifically for best practices to:

• Automatically build local projects that are dependencies of a project
• Share artifacts from project to their dependents
• Export a project's dependencies and generated artifacts (jars) to be inherited by dependent projects
• Share third-party dependencies between projects

I'm sure I can do all this without using Ivy - what did people do before Ivy? I really don't want to have to set up a corporate repository or rely on external repositories - the engineers here are really against that and have all their third-party jars checked into src control.

Can anyone point me at a good open source example of a multi-project ant build?

Nazar

Sorry to say that but reinventing the maven reactor, the concept of local/remote repositories, dependencies management and the conventions that come with it when you already have all this in Maven sounds insane. – Misrule

I'm not trying to re-invent it. It's not an option. I certainly don't want to use remote or local repositories. I just want to know what the best practices are/were before Maven or Ivy. I fully appreciate why those tools were invented now I'm dealing with this mess! ;-) – Nazar

Answer 1

I don't have too much hands on experience with building large numbers of dependent projects with Ant, but this tutorial looks like it will do what you need without any additional tools.

Spatiotemporal

Thanks! My searching efforts somehow missed this article - it looks pretty good so far. – Nazar