3.2.3.4  Building the Application 

To build the application, please run the build.sh script from your local source code root directory 

myApp. 

$ cd ~/myApp

$ ./build.sh

The build script will automatically determine which files have to be re compiled or re copied to 

the deployment directory that you have specified in the build.xml file. When you use build.sh the 

first time, the make utility Ant will create the whole directory structure from scratch. 

The build.xml file and the source code directories are organized in a way that the Servlet API 

Specification V2.2 compliant Web application hierarchy is generated automatically. This 

standard directory layout is shown in Figure 6. 

When building the application, you may also specify an optional parameter to control the build 

behavior (

$ ./build.sh [parameter]

). The available options are shown in the table below. 

Option 

Function 

prepare

Generates the deployment directory structure. 

clean

Removes the deployment home directory structure. 

compile

The default; Compiles/copies the project to the deployment home. 

javadoc

Generates the Java documentation. 

all

Executes clean, prepare, compile, and javadoc consecutively to re build all. 

dist

Generates the WAR file for the application; a Web archive is a compressed file that 

contains the whole Web application in a single file, conforming to the Servlet API 

Specification V2.2. The Web archive is used to easily distribute and deploy an 

application. The dist command also generates a JAR file of the source code. 

Table 4: Application Build Options 

Eventually, you may wish to modify the provided build.xml file, for example to generate the Java 

documentation in another directory, or to change the javac compiler settings (turn optimization 

on, for example). The Apache Ant documentation explains the available XML tags and attributes 

that make up the build script in the Ant reference documentation, which can be found here: 

http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/manual/

. 

40