Ant

As I mentioned in earlier chapters, Ant is a wonderful tool that comes loaded with builtin tasks. However, there are lots of external tasks available on the Net and you can also write your own. I would highly encourage you to explore Ant a bit further. Visit http://ant.apache.org/ for more details.

Also, look into continuous integration (martinfowler.com). This is a concept that is quickly becoming popular, and tools such as CruiseControl (cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net) are facilitating this concept.

One other notable product is Apache's Maven (maven.apache.org). This aims to automate and simplify the build process and has been gaining a lot of momentum recently.