<loadfile property="svn.revision" srcFile="./.svn/entries">
        <filterchain>
        <headfilter lines="1" skip="3"/>
        <deletecharacters chars="\n"/>
        </filterchain>
   </loadfile>

loads the current revision number into a property called svn.revision. I use this with svn 1.4 and 1.5 repositories and it works just fine.

<jar destfile="${app.id}-${app.version}.jar"
  index="true"
  filesetmanifest="merge">
  <fileset dir="${classes.dir}"/>
  <zipgroupfileset dir="${lib.dir}" includes="*.jar" />
</jar>

This takes all the files in ${classes.dir}, packs them in a jar and add the content of all the jar files in ${lib.dir}. In this case, we merge multiple manifests, but this can be changed according to the jar task documentation.

This works as long as none of your files is signed. You know that you are in trouble when you get messages like

java.lang.SecurityException: no manifiest section for signature file entry ....

I found a solution here, and the say that one has to remove the SUN_MICR files. This can be done manually, but keep it in mind when ever you update your libraries. I find it more elegant when ant just removes the files. Unfortunately it is to possible to specify excludes for zipgroupfileset. The alternative to zipgroupfileset is zipfileset, which allows exclude patterns and extraction of zip files via the src parameter. And thats the problem. You can only specify exactly one file as src. I don’t want to specify all my jars manually. Therefore I creates a single jar first, using zipgroupfileset and then move this file through a zip/zipfileset where we can exclude specific files.

<jar destfile="${app.id}-${app.version}.jar"
  index="true"
  filesetmanifest="merge">
  <fileset dir="${classes.dir}"/>
  <zipgroupfileset dir="${lib.dir}" includes="*.jar" />
</jar>
<zip destfile="temp-jar-file.jar">
  <zipfileset src="${app.id}-${app.version}.jar" excludes="META-INF/*.RSA, META-INF/*.DSA, META-INF/*.SF" />
</zip>
<move file="temp-jar-file.jar" tofile="${app.id}-${app.version}.jar"/>

You end up with a single, signature free jar file. This is not the most elegant solution, which would be either to enable multiple src files in zipfileset or an excludes parameter for zipgroupfileset that matches against the content of files, not the input files. But still, its small and does not need any third party ant tasks.

src/ - all java soources in here
lib/
  devel/ - development libraries
  runtime/ - runtime libraries

If your project follows this struicture, you can get the following tasks out of the box:

Buildfile: build.xml

Main targets:

 clean          Clean
 compile        Compile all source files
 compile-tests  Compile all source files
 dist           Build library and pack jar file
 dist-one       Build library and pack jar file
 doc            Create Javadoc
 html-reports   Creates HTML from test reports
 test           Run JUnit Tests
Default target: dist

You can modify the properties to adapt different names or a different project structure. The script creates a target directory that contains the results.

Compiling and packing should work out of the box, but the test sections expects a junit and ant-junit jars in lib/devel. They can also be placed in one of Ants lib directories.

The build file