Section 9.6. What You Still Don t Know

9.6. What You Still Don't Know

What we've covered here will probably explain most of the buildfiles you encounter in the wild. It will probably also give you what you need to know to build most of the buildfiles you will have to build. But we have left out a fair amount.

You can write your own tasks. That's a biggie right there. There are many built-in tasks that we didn't cover. Look those up. They might be just what you need if you find yourself saying, "Boy, ant is nice, but I wish it could do X." X might already be a built-in task. And if not, you can write it.

Ant has datatypes that can often be used in place of the simple strings allowed in task attributes. Tasks and datatypes are instances of Java base classes defined in the source code for ant. If you download the source, you can write your own classes that extend these base classes and you can thus add your own tags to ant.