Ant: The Definitive Guide

Ant is the premier build-management tool for Java environments. Ant is part of Jakarta, Sun's open source reference implementation for the J2EE specification, is written entirely in Java, and is platform independent. Using XML, a Java developer describes the modules involved in a build, and the dependencies between those modules. Ant then does the rest, compiling components as necessary in order to build the application. Using Ant, Java developers can: define build chunks, the results that they must produce, and the dependencies between them; automatically retrieve source code from source control systems such as PVCS; build applications by having Ant compile the necessary source files in the proper order; Ant build files are written using XML so programmers are not required to learn yet another scripting language. They will likely already know XML, and will be able to leverage that knowledge. Ant is an open source project, and part of the Jakarta project. Jakarta is Sun's open source reference implementation for the JSP and Servlets specifications, and is part of the Apache group's work.