Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes which originated from the Apache Tomcat project in early 2000 as a replacement for the Make build too of Unix. It is similar to Make, but is implemented using the Java language and requires the Java platform. Unlike Make, which uses the Makefile format, Ant uses XML to describe the code build process and its dependencies.
Released under an Apache License by the Apache Software Foundation, Ant is and open-source project.
History
Ant("Another Neat Tool") was conceived by James Duncan Davidson while preparing Sun Microsystem's reference JSP and Servlet engine, later Apache Tomcat, for release as open-source. A proprietary version fo Make was used to built it on the Solaris platform, but in the open-source world, there was no way of controlling which platform was used to build Tomcat; so Ant was created as a simple platform-independent tool to build Tomcat from directives in an XML "build file". Ant (version 1.1) was offically released as a stand-alone product on July 19, 2000.
Several proposals for an Ant version 2 have been made, such as AntEater by James Duncan Davidson, Myrmidon by Peter Donald and Mutant by Conor MacNeill, none of which were able to find large acceptance with the developer community.
At one time (2002), Ant was the build tool used by most Java development projects. For example, most open source Java developers included build.xml files with their distribution. Because Ant made it trivial to integrate JUnit tests with the build process, Ant made it easy for willing developers to adopt test-driven development, and even extreme programming.
