Ant Tutorial

ANT Tutorial

Apache Ant is a Java based build tool from Apache Software Foundation. Apache Ant's build files are written in XML and take advantage of the open standard, portable and easy to understand nature of XML.

Ant Uses :-

Before diving deep into the definition of Apache Ant, one must understand the need for a build tool. Why do I need Ant, or more specifically, why do I need a build tool?

Do you spend your day doing the following manually?

• Compile code
• Package the binaries
• Deploy the binaries to the test server
• Test your changes
• Copy code from one location to another

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.