philduba.com

- went over basic tags and related them to cf tags used in a component to make it easier to understand - there's an example in the presentation downlaod
- all properties set are global and cannot be overwritten using property tag elsewhere/after "creation"
- went right into examples with all online at MXUnit.org (well, at least in the presentation zip file)
    - first was just to show properties, targets, depends, and basic ANT language structure
    - second, was to copy files from one server to another where also bringing over shared directores (ie., more than one app uses the same codebase)
        - directories end with backslashes
        - use excludes to not copy items over to including filters
        - can put multiple file sets into the copy tag
    - third example - zip files
        - not shown, but can add existing files to a zip archive
        - casesensitive="false" - particularly useful on Windows
        - the number of files, amount of includes/excludes will increase the time of zip execution
        - prefix - use to create a containing directory for the zip for quicker deployment
        - can set more than one zipfileset
        - showed how to build with different prefixes to push different code across a number of different directories (ie. inetpub\wwwroot and coldfusion8\customtags)
        - can unzip, just not shown
    - fourth example - using SVN (in supplement code, there is VSS examples as well)
        - sets up the SVN properties (.jar files, paths, etc.)
        - connect to svn using username/password - best case to use a properties file
        - first step was checkout using checkout tag
        - second step was update using update tag (enclosed in svn tag)
        - can use to tag SVN files
        - in appendix, there is a file that uses tagging very well
    - fifth example - ftp of files
        - ftp task with external download
        - only do newer files using newer attribute
        - ftp has minute level granularity so it won't copy over unless you use "cache" area of his examples - gives second level granularity

Resources
- Jim Priest - www.thecrumb.com/wiki/Ant
- Mike Henke - www.henke.ws/machblog
- Luis Manjo - http://coldboxframework.org
- guys at MXUnit.org at Update:theguys@mxunit.org (list for asking questions)
ANT Manual is the uiltimate resource
- http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html
- well documented, with many examples

Getting back at work
- download presentation
- create new, empty directories
- copy build-stub.xml from preso directory
- copy some of applications to this directory
- add targets to build.xml file and play around
- check out the "teasers" for additonal stuff
- have fun since this is a safe directory
- for configuration, see the other ppt in the zip

I'd recommend downloading the presentation zip over at MXUnit.org and looking through the examples. I know I'm going to be using the as starting points for some of the things I want to do now and when our new architecture comes online.