Ant

It's a open source tool that is easy to use and totally platform independent. If you want to learn how to use Ant to build own java projects and if you are use already exposing to Ant.

Apache Ant is a open source , it's a cross platform based and it's a build tool that is used to describe a build process and it's dependencies and implemented in XML Scripts used in java classes that ensuring to extensibility to any development environment (based on java) and it's the integrity with the other build tools.

The Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. According to it's original author, James Duncan Davidson, the name is an acronym for another neat tool.

A Brief History for Ant

Ant started out as an internal component of Tomcat, the servlet container that is used in the reference implementation for the Java Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) technologies.

The Tomcat code base was donated to the Apache Software Foundation there, it became part of the Apache Jakarta project, which has a mission to produce open source, server-side solutions for the Java platform. The usefulness of Ant was quickly recognized and its usage spread throughout the other Jakarta subprojects.

Thus, it was made into a Jakarta subproject of its own, with the first independent release being made in July of 2000. Since then, Ant's popularity has grown and grown. It has won numerous industry awards and become the de facto standard for building open source Java projects. In November of 2002, this success was acknowledged by Ant's promotion to a top-level Apache project. At the time of writing, the current stable release of Ant is 1.5.4, which supports all.

JDK versions from 1.1 onwards. Beta versions of the next release, 1.6, are also available; these require JDK 1.2 or later. Planning is also underway for a future 2.0 release, which will involve a major rearchitecture. Ant 2.0 will feature improved consistency and enhanced functionality, whilst still retaining Ant's core goals of simplicity, ease of understanding, and extensibility.

Ant is the open source build technology and it's developed by the Apache intended to build processes in Java environment. Basically Ant is totally based on XML and uses java classes in automatic generation of builded processes that makes it platform independent. A build file is generally named as build.xml.

The bets features of the Ant technology can be summarized as below:-

The Ant technology is you Easily to Use .It's not a programming languages, it is an XML based scripting tool, it's totally using scripting languages and you are easy to understand and implement.
Portability and cross-platform based: Uses of the Java classes makes it portability, it means , the Ant is run on any operating system.
Extended Functionality of Ant Technology: The functionality can be extended to any development environment based on java. and it's easily to implementing than any specific IDE.
Build Automation: Ant provides automated build processes that is faster and more efficient than manual procedures and other build tools can also be integrated with it.
Compilation of Source Code: Ant can use and compile source code from a variety of version controls and packaging of the compiled code and resources can also be done.
Handling Dependencies between Targets: An Ant Project describes the target and tasks associated with it and also handles dependencies between various targets and tasks.

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