I know I said I would be taking a step by step introduction to Gant in my last post on the subject but sometimes the devil drives and you need things done in a less systematic way.

Recently I have been building Java and Scala projects with Gant. I think it has been a successful exercise so I am just going to jump on and show you some example buildfiles. The first one is going to be a Java project. This project is obviously toy code but I think if you just download the sample project and start filling in your own code (it’s an Eclipse project, Intellij and NetBeans should both import it successfully) you will be happy with how little you have to change the build file.

First have a look at the Gant file itself and then I am going to talk about the things that I think make Gant such a powerful and productive tool. The first thing to point out is the line count, this represents a complete build file for a Java SE project in under 100 lines. That includes the Hello World target I’ve left in as an echo test. Gant might have a slightly weird syntax if you are unfamiliar with Groovy but it isn’t verbose.

Targets and dependencies were in the last post so this time the new thing is using AntBuilder. Any method call that starts with Ant is a invocation of an Ant task. These are nothing but thin wrappers around the normal Ant task (and in fact I usually write them using the Ant Task documentation). Things that are attributes in Ant XML become hash properties in the parameter list. Things that would normally be nested elements are calls to the enclosing builder.

One area where Gant wins big is the way you can mix normal variables, Groovy string interpolation and Ant properties. Declaring the directory paths as Groovy variables near the head of the file allows me to create new paths via interpolation and assign the variable to the properties of an Ant task. Ant XML has properties and macro interpolation but this is both clearer and easier.

I am also using the Gant built-in clean task and in the course of using it, Groovy’s operator overloading for lists. I’m not a huge fan of operator overloading but if it’s clear enough here then it is great to have a DRY list assignment.

I also like the way that the directories are created in the init task. This kind of closure looping over a list again shows some of the power and conciseness that can be achieved by a language rather than a configuration file. If you don’t read Groovy then the each method iterates over the list its attached to and each item resulting from the iteration is stored in the whimsical “it” local variable.