


It became an independent project managed by the Apache Software Foundation – hence the official name Apache Ant.
#Apache ant stands for code
So James wrote Ant in pure Java code as a replacement to Make.Soon thereafter, Ant was used by several open source Java projects and spread like a virus. He used the Make build tool on Unix, but on Windows he had to write different build script. James was creating Tomcat’s builds for different operating systems and he found that there’s no cross-platform build tools he can use. A Brief History of AntAnt was created by James Ducan Davidson in early 2000 when he was working on the Apache Tomcat project. But Ant is not limited to that, it is a powerful tool that can be used to automate any type of process which can be described in terms of targets and tasks (a target contains a set of tasks). Then you can use only a single Ant command to build the project, comfortably.That’s basically how Ant works and the reason why we need to use it. So you can automate the build process by creating an Ant build script that describes all the tasks need to be executed. If you do this build process manually, you have to use javac command to compile, jar command to package and maybe an OS-dependent command to change the JAR file name.That build process is repetitive and time-consuming if done manually. In each build, the name of the JAR file is suffixed by the current date time to track versions and releases. class files, then packaging the compiled files to an executable JAR file. Imagine you are working on a Java project that contains many classes and the build process involves in compiling. What is Ant?Apache Ant is a Java library and command-line tool for automating software build processes. You will also know how IDEs like Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA support Ant. By the end of the tutorial, you will understand the role of Ant in developing Java projects and able to develop a simple Java project using Ant build. In this tutorial, you will learn about Apache Ant – one of most popular build tools for software development with Java.
