Chapter 12. Extending Ant

There's more to Ant than what comes out of the box because you can extend Ant in various ways. The most common way of extending Ant is by creating your own tasks, and this chapter covers how to do that. You'll learn how to create new tasks, handle task attributes, access property values, work with nested text and elements, make builds fail, work with filesets, use custom tasks as wrappers for external programs, and more.

Besides creating new tasks, you can extend Ant in other ways, such as using scripting languages such as JavaScript, which I'll explain. You can even create listeners that respond to build file events by executing Java code, and create loggers that log data as a build progresses. And you can create custom filters and selectors, which you can use with some Ant tasks such as copy.