I use Ant for my Java projects. It’s a great and powerfule build too. However, there’s always more than can be done to improve the quality of the build process.
I found this nice article that gives some good examples of a complete build process with Ant: dev, test, prod, etc.
So there I was, poking around in some java / j2ee code, trying to learn how it all works. I did some testing on a Linux server and realized, something is broken. It seemed something was corrupting ALL the Jar files in WEB-INF/lib/.
A co-worker guessed that the token filtering Ant was doing might be the culprit. He was right. It seems Ant has issues with detecting whether files are binary or not, given that it uses a Reader class which runs the files through a character decoder. This is specifically a problem on Unix systems since they commonly use UTF8 character set, and in that case Ant hasn’t a clue if its looking at UTF8 text or binary data.