At present Ant does not come bundled with Simple Cart. This means that you are responsible for downloading and installing Ant. Some IDEs (such as Eclipse) include ANT. The Tools Appendix contains information about where to find Ant and ant tutorials. Once this is complete you can use Ant to build Simple Cart

Ant uses XML to define build targets. A target represents a particular task that relates to the build and may include items such as gather pre-requisites, compile source code and package compiled code for deployment or execution. The XML file is traditionally called build.xml and in the case of Simple Cart is located in the root directory of the checkout. To run the script simply navigate to this directory and call the ant executable.

Identified in the build script (build.xml) is a default target. This is the target that is called if you do not identify a particular target. The default target for Simple Cart is the dist target, which in turn calls other targets to create build directories, compile source code, copy related files and package a WAR file for deployment. You may call ant to run a single target. For example, if you wanted to simply create the build directories you could call ant init. This will execute the init target in the build script.

The documentation for Simple Cart also uses an ant script. The default target for building the documentation is defaulthtml. This will generate multiple HTML pages for each of the different sets of documentation. If you are generating all documentation call Ant with the docs target. This will generate the defaulthtml as explained, but will additionally generate PDF and printablehtml output.

All documentation for Simple Cart was written in XML using the docbook DTD. The full documentation is included when you download the source code as outlined above. For more information about docbook visit their web site. Many tools and tutorials are available.

If for some reason the build process fails it might be easy to fix.