Apache Ant

Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes, which originated from the Apache Tomcat project in early 2000. It was a replacement for the unix make build tool, and was created due to a number of problems with the unix make. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects.

The most immediately noticeable difference between Ant and Make is that Ant uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, whereas Make uses Makefile format. By default the XML file is named build.xml.

Ant is an Apache project. It is open source software, and is released under the Apache License.

History

Ant ("Another Neat Tool") was conceived by James Duncan Davidson while preparing Sun's reference JSP/Servlet engine, later Apache Tomcat, for release as open source. A proprietary version of make was used to build it on Solaris, but in the open source world there was no way of controlling which platform was used to build Tomcat; so Ant was created as a simple platform-independent tool to build Tomcat from directives in an XML "build file". Ant (version 1.1) was officially released as a stand-alone product on July 19, 2000.