If You're Not Using Ant...Maybe You Should Be
Recently, there's been a lot of noise about Ant on the blogs I read and rightfully so. Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about. I've been using Ant for 3 or 4 years now and I wanted to add my voice to that cacophony of espousal.
I'm such a fan of Ant that I make all of my developers write build and/or deployment Ant scripts for every project they develop. Even the small projects. It kind of cheeses them off from time to time, but having these deployment scripts means that every action required to build/deploy a project is done in exactly the same way every single time. In terms of risk management, there's no substitute for this.
I've worked on small projects that deploy directly to a staging or production server and on enterprise level web applications that are distributed internationally. ANT is an indispensable tool in my development life cycle. I don't expect that to change any time soon.
For what it's worth, there are two external task libraries that I think are essential: SvnAnt (for those using Subversion, of course) and Antelope. The latter offers a lot of very handy utilitarian tasks like if, grep and so much more.
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