Building the JavaEdge Application with Ant and Anthill

Building an application is more than just compiling the source code. Ideally, building an application would comprise all the steps required to produce readily consumable artifacts. But we must notice that different audiences are going to require different consumable artifacts. For example, the development team may require Javadocs and last night’s test results as artifacts, whereas the QA team may not care about the Javadocs as much as the revision log. The end user may not care about either of these and just want a URL in the case of an online application or an executable in the case of a traditional program. So building an application may need to produce a whole range of artifacts, each consumable by one or more of the target audiences of the build.