Invoking Ant from Maven: The Maven AntRun Plugin

Context

In my previous entries, Accessing Maven dependencies through Ant: Part 1 and Part 2 , I had been talking about how we can explore Maven dependencies from Ant. Here, we will talk about how we can do the reverse, that is, invoke Ant from within Maven. I guess this is the more common scenario of the two. Often we have encountered a legacy project which has Ant as the build tool, and we need to integrate that with Maven, often invoking the Ant's build file from pom.xml. We will continue using our RMI Sever as an example.
We will actually use the Idiot's paradigm © to demonstrate how to invoke Ant through Maven.

Using the Maven AntRun Plugin

Is pretty straight forward. I have created a Profile called AetherAntTaskExample, which looks like:

		
			AetherAntTaskExample
			
				
					
						org.apache.maven.plugins
						maven-antrun-plugin
						1.7
						
							
								package
								
									
										
										
										
										
										
									
								
								
									run
								
							
						
					
				
			
		

You invoke this by doing:

mvn clean package -P AetherAntTaskExample

The ant file is invoked and executed. The original pom.xml can be found here.