Apache Ant/XML Summary

Brief Overview of XML

This chapter has a summary of the things you need to know about XML to use Apache Ant. It is not a lot of information and users that are already familiar with HTML will pick up the concepts very quickly.

You do not need to know a lot about XML to use Ant. Just a few syntaxical items.

First, you must be very careful to match up the "begin" and "end" tags. Begin tags start with a "<" and end tags have the same name but start with a "</". Here is an simple example:

  <MyDataElement>
     Data Inside...
  </MyDataElement>

Train your eye to look for the </ that ends a tag. If it does not match up something is wrong. Tags that do not match up will cause errors.

Data Element Nesting

All XML Data Elements must be paired using matching start and end tags:

  <Parent_XML_Element>
     <Child_XML_Element>
        <Sub_Child_XML_Element>
        </Sub_Child_XML_Element>
     </Child_XML_Element>
  </Parent_XML_Element >

Understanding this paired nesting structure is critical to creating working Ant build files.

XML Attributes

The XML begin tag may also have attributes.

  <MyTag attribute1="nothing" attribute2="nothing else">Text</MyTag>

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