Developing Web Applications With Ant by Richard Hightower - HTML preview

Building and Deploying the Web Application

This section explains how to build and deploy the Web application. The build file assumes that you have Tomcat (or Resin) installed in the root of your drive. You may need to make adjustments to the build file if you installed Tomcat in another directory or if you are using another J2EE-compliant Web application server.

To build the Web application, follow these steps:

 

1. Navigate to the WebApplication directory, set up the environment, and then enter the following at the command line:

 

C:\CVS\...\MVCHelloWorld\WebApplication>ant

 

You will get the following output:

 

Buildfile: build.xml
setProps:
init:

clean_deploy:
[delete] Could not find file C:\resin\webapps\hello.war to delete. [delete] Could not find file C:\tomcat\webapps\hello.war to delete

clean:
[delete] Could not find file C:\tmp\app\dist\hello.war to delete.

prepare:
[mkdir] Created dir: C:\tmp\app\webapps\webclasses [mkdir] Created dir: C:\tmp\app\dist

compile:
[javac] Compiling 1 source file to C:\tmp\app\webapps\webclasses package:
[mkdir] Created dir: C:\tmp\app\webapps\meta
prepare_meta_ejb:
prepare_meta_noejb:
prepare_meta:
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\tmp\app\webapps\meta [war] Building war: C:\tmp\app\dist\hello.war
all:
BUILD SUCCESSFUL

2. Deploy the WAR files to the application server. If you install Tomcat off the root directory, then you can run the deploy target. Otherwise, modify the appropriate deploy properties defined in the init target. To deploy the application with Ant, do the following:

C:\CVS\?.\MVCHelloWorld\WebApplication>ant deploy
Buildfile: build.xml
...
...

deploy:
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\resin\webapps
[copy] Copying 1 file to C:\tomcat\webapps

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds

 

3. After we run the application, we start Tomcat, and then hit the site with our browser. We can also clean out the directories when we are ready to deploy a new version:

C:\CVS\...\MVCHelloWorld\WebApplication>ant clean
The output looks like this:
Buildfile: build.xml

setProps:
init:

clean_deploy:
[delete] Deleting: C:\resin\webapps\hello.war
[delete] Deleting: C:\tomcat\webapps\hello.war

clean:
[delete] Deleting directory C:\tmp\app\webapps [delete] Deleting: C:\tmp\app\dist\hello.war

BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 0 seconds Notice that we delete the WAR files and the deployment directories. This is just good housecleaning for when we do a build and deploy. In the next section, we run the Web application project.