Chapter 12. Optimal Builds

One of the first tasks you'll undertake during the construction phase of a project is the design of the development environment. A well-designed environment is paramount to ensuring the entire project team can work productively and effectively.

In this chapter, we focus specifically on one aspect of the development environment that is critical to a successful rapid application development project, the build process. We cover in detail the importance of a fast, accurate, and maintainable build process, and examine the use of the Apache Ant build utility for producing optimal build environments for J2EE applications.

This chapter covers several areas regarding the build process:

• The importance of an efficient build process for rapid development

• The advantages of Ant as a build tool

• How to manage build dependencies in order to reduce build times

• The use of the open source tool Antgraph for graphically viewing dependencies in Ant files

• Guidelines for organizing the code artifacts of J2EE projects

• Suggested best practices for working with Ant

We conclude by revisiting the Jython scripting language and demonstrating how Jython scripts can readily extend the features of Ant.