Hi, I'm a newbie with ant and probably like a lot of newbies, I am amazed at how many things you can do with ant and how easy it seems to use it.
Thanks to the contributors for creating/enabling such a vibrant community. I've been following the ant lists for a week or so and I saw many people mentioning doing "everything" with ant which was also my first desire. I would like to get more details about how people do "everything", about the design of their automated develop/build/distribute/deploy/test system and about the common pitfalls. I imagine this is quite a popular question, so I hope someone has written some docs with guidelines... I am particularly interested in using ant in order to integrate testing with the build process. I would like to get feedback and experience about what kind of tests can be integrated with ant and what testing frameworks people use. I have seen two frameworks used so far ( and already integrated in ant) 1. JUnit for running unit tests 2. the testlet framework from the avalon project which can be invoked through the <test> task I would like to know how the second one is different from the first, what are the use cases for the two of them respectively ( Well, i can see differences by myself by looking at the code, but I don't have the experience with either of them to be able to understand what the issues are) It seems that both of them are quite lightweight and exetensible. Does anyone know of projects that build extensions on top of these frameworks ? or of other testing frameworks ? What can be used to automate running other kinds of tests which would not be restricted to testing one single class... integration tests/ system tests... ? Basically any process can be viewed as a test ? Can ant be used to build a test harness/framework which would run any kind of test and be able to collect/report/publish results in a meaningful way ? Probably not... it seems that the logic that can be embedded in an ant buildfile is limited since it was intended precisely to be just a buildfile? But where would the border be? What are the test-related tasks which make sense to be implemented as ant projects/subprojects and which are the tasks better implemented in a more heavy-weight java harness ? Again, I'm quite a newbie so please excuse me if my questions are naive/obvious/... ? Thanks, Ioan
