How to assemble a multi-project ant build system

Question

At my new gig, they use Ant and cannot be persuaded to move to Maven. I've looked everywhere for a decent example of how a multi-project ant build system should be assembled. The apache site falls short. I'm looking specifically for best practices to:

• Automatically build local projects that are dependencies of a project
• Share artifacts from project to their dependents
• Export a project's dependencies and generated artifacts (jars) to be inherited by dependent projects
• Share third-party dependencies between projects

I'm sure I can do all this without using Ivy - what did people do before Ivy? I really don't want to have to set up a corporate repository or rely on external repositories - the engineers here are really against that and have all their third-party jars checked into src control.

Can anyone point me at a good open source example of a multi-project ant build?

Answer 1

I don't have too much hands on experience with building large numbers of dependent projects with Ant, but this tutorial looks like it will do what you need without any additional tools.