ant as a workflow engine

[Scott Walters]

I'm in the process of architecting a rewrite of our external system interface modules. In general, these modules extract specific data from our database, send it somewhere, poll for a response and then import the response back into the database. They do this with several vendors, each with their own data requirments and transport mechanisms.

There's a lot of code reuse possibilities since many of the vendors use very similar data formats and HTTP POST transport mechanisms.

Given this, I'm seriously considering implementing the individual pieces of this project as ant tasks and processing each request by programatically invoking a build script that controls the execution of these tasks. Requests would come into a servlet, which would invoke the ant script in a new thread, specifying the ant target that implements the particular interface requested.

I'm certainly no ant expert, however. All I've done is create some fairly simple scripts to build and jar java code. My specific questions are...

1) Can I pipe the xml output of one task into the next task without using a file?

2) Do tasks within a target always run in the order they're specified in the build script?

Any other advice or comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Scott




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