Usually you wouldn’t ever use a hello world example in Ant. Outputting text isn’t really the goal of the thing. But this will give you a chance to see how to run an ant build.

So, open up a text editor and save the following as build.xml.

<project name="HelloWorld">

  <target name="sayhello">
    <echo>Hello World!</echo>
  </target>
</project>

You would then run the program as:

ant sayhello

As you might expect, it simply says Hello World!

Echo messages are useful to track the process of an Ant Task when it’s going through specific procedures that you specify.

I use Ant a lot when I program. Mostly for deploying whatever I’ve been coding to a test site. I currently have an ant build file that has two targets. One target will put the files to a tomcat server running ColdFusion 9, the other target will deploy the files to a server running Railo.

Eventually I’d like to have my build file run to all of the possible ColdFusion versions that I can. Now that would be something special.

I should start a section regarding Ant… now that would be something special.