Ant is a build tool such as make, gnumake, nmake, jam,… without their limitations.
Ant is a Java technology-based build tool developed by the Apache Software Foundation (http://ant.apache.org/).
Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing to:
Ant can also be used effectively to build non Java applications, for instance C or C++ applications.
More generally, Ant can be used to pilot any type of process which can be described in terms of:
Ant uses XML-based configuration files (called build.xml by default) to execute tasks written in Java.
Ant is:
According to Ant's original author, James Duncan Davidson, the name is an acronym for “Another Neat Tool”.
Ant has the ability to structure a “build” into modules that can either be called separately or as a whole. That way, you can run any task in isolation. You can also group tasks into a task suite that again can be part of a bigger task suite. In the end you have a tree of task suites, where each node and subtree can be executed.
Results can be reported in XML format for later presentation via XSLT.