ANT stands for Another Neat Tool. It is a Java-based build tool from
Apache. Before going into the details of Apache Ant, let us first
understand why we need a build tool in the first place.
Need for a Build Tool
On an average, a developer spends a substantial amount of time doing mundane tasks like build and deployment that include:- Compiling the code
- Packaging the binaries
- Deploying the binaries to the test server
- Testing the changes
- Copying the code from one location to another
History of Apache Ant
- Ant was created by James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Tomcat).
- It was originally used to build Tomcat, and was bundled as a part of Tomcat distribution.
- Ant was born out of the problems and complexities associated with the Apache Make tool.
- Ant was promoted as an independent project in Apache in the year 2000. The latest version of Apache Ant as on May 2014 is 1.9.4.
Features of Apache Ant
- Ant is the most complete Java build and deployment tool available.
- Ant is platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators.
- Ant can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command.
- Ant scripts are written using plain XML. If you are already familiar with XML, you can learn Ant pretty quickly.
- Ant is good at automating complicated repetitive tasks.
- Ant comes with a big list of predefined tasks.
- Ant provides an interface to develop custom tasks.
- Ant can be easily invoked from the command line and it can integrate with free and commercial IDEs.
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