We already know that we can use Guvnor to build packages externally. In this section we'll look how to do it with a build tool called Ant. We can then easily add an artifact compilation step into our existing build process that we may have.
Note that in future versions the Drools team is planning to add support for Maven as well. If you're running Maven, as a workaround it is possible to call an Ant task from within a Maven build.
Apache Ant is a general-purpose building tool. More information about Ant can be found at http://ant.apache.org/. Module drools-ant, from the droolsjbpm-tools-distribution-5.5.0.Final.zip
downloadable file contains an Ant task for building Drools artifacts. We'll build the validation knowledge base from Chapter 3, Validating, using this Ant task.
All information required by Ant will be stored in a file called build.xml
. We'll now go step-by-step through this file. It starts with a project definition:
<?xml version="1.0...