Apache Ant Recipes for Web Developers

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Book Preface

This book is a collection of Apache Ant recipes that I have gathered up over the years whilst doing Web development. The book is not intended to be an introduction to using Apache Ant, nor does it pretend to be a complete treatment on using Ant with the various technologies that I have presented. You will still need to refer to Ant's rather good manual or any of the other proper Ant books to learn 'how to use ant'.

This experimental book was a side project to investigate how to 'self publish' a small book. Doing a book by oneself is a powerful reminder of how difficult it is to create something of quality when you do not have a team of talented people behind you doing the copy editing, reviewing, graphics and all the inevitable checking that ends up making one look professional. Hence, the most difficult decision with self publishing was acknowledging that I had to be satisfied with much less then I am normally comfortable with.

I hope that readers will look past my foibles as a 'newbie' book publisher and get some value out of the Ant Recipes contained within. -- James Fuller

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Text Recipes
  • Find and Replace
  • Managing Encoding and Whitespace
  • Handling Unicode
  • Facilitating Localisation
  • Advanced Text Processing
  • Conclusion
• Database Recipes
  • Mysql Import
  • Accessing SQL
  • The SQL Task
  • A note about XML Database
  • Conclusion
• XML Recipes
  • The Basics
  • Working with XSLT
  • Validating XML
  • Open Office XML Documents
  • Source Code Bonus: Advanced XML Databases
  • Conclusion
• Web Recipes
  • Working with HTTP
  • Consistent and Clean HTML
  • Optimizing the Web
  • Other Web Techniques
  • Source Code Bonus: Web Services
  • Conclusion
• Case Study: Working with Multilingual Websites
  • Critical Concepts
  • Overview of Example Multilingual Site
  • Requirements
  • Running the Code
  • Looking at the Code
  • Conclusion
• Appendix
  • License, Disclaimers and Copyrights
  • 3rd party Licenses
  • Installing Ant
  • Ant Commandline Options
• Recipes Index

Recipe Index

• Page 9 - “Learn how to find and replace text”
• Page 11 - “Substitute tokens found in text using Ant native filter functionality”
• Page 13 - “Create reusable sets of filters that perform token replacement”
• Page 14 - “Create sophisticated find and replace pipelines”
• Page 17 - “Find and replace text using property expansion”
• Page 20 - ”Manage translation of end of line, carriage returns, tabs, and end of file characters between operating systems”
• Page 21 - ”fix line ending encodings”
• Page 22 - ”compress a set of SQL statements”
• Page 22 - ”Output a specific encoding”
• Page 23 - “Preprocess source text files so that they are in the correct encoding and format for the current operating system”
• Page 23 - “Process a set of text source files so all characters are encoded using Unicode”
• Page 25 - “Task orientated unicode conversion”
• Page 27 - “Transform a set of source text files into a range of language variants”
• Page 32 - “Advanced text processing with Jacson Ant Task”
• Page 35 - ”Manage import of csv delimited data into MySQL”
• Page 36 - ”Use the result of a SQL query as properties within your Ant build”
• Page 37 - ”Execute SQL statements in Ant”
• Page 41 - ”Generate XML directly from your Ant scripts”
• Page 42 - ”Load external XML into Ant Properties”
• Page 45 - ”For loop processing in Ant”
• Page 46 - ”Perform update operations on existing XML documents”
• Page 46 - ”How to include an XML document into another using Xinclude”
• Page 52 - ”Use conditions to check what the XML Parser supports"
• Page 53 - ”Simple XSLT Processing with Ant”
• Page 55 - ”More sophisticated XSLT processing”
• Page 56 - ”Generate documentation for your XSLT using XSLTDoc”
• Page 59 - ”Generate a DTD for Ant markup”
• Page 60 - ”Validate XML using Ant’s built in facilities”
• Page 62 - ”Validate using schemavalidate Task”
• Page 64 - ”Get additional error information on XML errors using xmllint”
• Page 64 - ”Get additional error information on XML errors using rxp”
• Page 64 - ”Speed up the resolving of DTD by using catalogs”
• Page 66 - ”Speed up Xerces Schema validation through grammar caching”
• Page 66 - ”Validate using Schematron”
• Page 67 - ”Use Jing and Namespace Routing Language to orchestrate parallel and multiple schema validation”
• Page 69 - ”Use Jing to perform all major schema validation”
• Page 71 - ”Use Namespace Routing Language to control binding of schema validation to XML Namespace”
• Page 72 - ”Use Namespace Routing Language to achieve concurrent schema validation”
• Page 74 - ”applying an XSLT transformation to an OpenDocument”
• Page 78 - ”transforming Docbook to HTML or WordML”
• Page 80 - ”Create sophisticated documentation using Docbook XML"
• Page 83 - ”Check that a site is live and accessible”
• Page 84 - ”Perform a HTTP Get with Ant”
• Page 84 - ”Perform a HTTP Post”
• Page 85 - ”Perform a HTTP Put”
• Page 88 - ”FTP with Ant”
• Page 88 - ”Telnet with Ant”
• Page 88 - ”Email with Ant”
• Page 89 - ”Securely copy files between remote servers”
• Page 89 - ”Securely log onto a remote machine and execute a command”
• Page 90 - ”Making Ant work with proxies”
• Page 94 - ”Validate xhtml, html, etc...”
• Page 95 - ”Create HTML pages from components using xinclude”
• Page 98 - ”Use ispell to spellcheck your html”
• Page 98 - ”Check that a distribution of files conforms to a desired directory and filestructure”
• Page 100 - ”Clean up X/HTML with HTML Tidy”
• Page 102 - ”Clean up X/HTML with JTidy”
• Page 102 - ”Clean up X/HTML with TagSoup”
• Page 103 - ”Compress a set of HTML files”
• Page 105 - ”Optimising css with yui.compressor”
• Page 105 - ”Compacting JS with yui.compressor”
• Page 107 - ”Reduce the number of HTTP requests by concatenating JS files”
• Page 107 - ”Measuring website performance with Apache Benchmark”
• Page 110 - "Starting and stoping apache webserver"
• Page 112 - ”Check status of webserver, email and ftp server”
• Page 114 - ”Develop and deploy a Firefox toolbar”
• Page 115 - “Creating a web backup”

About the Author

James Fuller has been a professional developer for many years, working with several blue-chip software companies in both his native USA and in Europe. He has used Apache Ant for the best part of a decade in several software build solutions. He has also co-written a few technology-related books and writes articles focusing on XML technologies. He spends his free time playing with XML databases and XQuery. He is technical director for Webcomposite s.r.o. and Senior Engineer for MarkLogic can be reached at: