Apache Ant-Another Neat Tool

Why is it called Ant? Because it is a small build tool that can support automation of large projects What is Ant? Ant is an open source, build tool. It is called build tool because it includes the automation of tasks from obtaining the source code, linking with libraries, deploying the project. It uses xml configuration file to perform its tasks. Imagine that you are working on a large project. The project is a Java project and consists of many .java files. It consists of classes that are dependent on other classes and classes which are stubs or drivers, they are situated in multiple directories and the output files must go into multiple directories too. Suppose you have to perform obvious operations with the .java files as: Compile the .java files. Put the .class files in a directory. Put the .class files in a .jar. Put all the html/jsp/css and other web files in one directory and package them in .war Package all the third party libraries and dependancies into another .jar Package all the .jars, .wars into .ears for deployment Clean all the directories before every use so that you get fresh compiled versions or packaged structures. If you try to use a manual process for building your software you would find it to be tedious, error prone and, in general, not very repeatable. You might forget to set the version number or to provide a tar file for Unix users. Few of Ants features:

Ant is platform-independent and hence Cross-platform. It is written purely in Java. Ant is particularly good at automating complicated repetitive tasks and thus is well suited for automating standardized build processes. Ant accepts instructions in the form of XML documents thus are extensible and easy to maintain.

More popular than make for building Java projects Updated and improved regularly Straightforward XML syntax Plug-in oriented architecture encourages expansion Directly supported by some IDEs (with more coming) Free and open source.

Ant Works? Refer ant pdf..