Apache Ant

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

On an average, a developer spends a substantial amount of time doing mundane tasks like build and deployment that include:

• Compiling the code
• Packaging the binaries
• Deploying the binaries to the test server
• Testing the changes
• Copying the code from one location to another

To automate and simplify the above tasks, Apache Ant is useful. It is an Operating System build and deployment tool that can be executed from the command line.

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.