Appendix C. IDE Integration
All of the popular Java IDEs support Ant out of the box. This gives the users the best of both worlds—great environments for developing their application, and a build tool that can compile, test, and deploy that application.
Ant doesn’t constrain or dictate your choice of IDE. Developers should choose whatever editor supports their needs, without worrying about whether it supports Ant, because the answer is always “of course it does.” Even so, there are some differences in features and ease of configuration and use. Here is a quick guide to using Ant in Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ IDEA, the three main Java IDEs.
The IDEs parse the build file and make it easier to view, edit, and use. They usually have an Ant-aware editor, which lets you navigate around targets and add Ant tasks to them. Eclipse and NetBeans let you debug Ant, setting breakpoints in a build file. IntelliJ IDEA doesn’t offer this feature, but it does determine which properties are unset and highlights them in the text editor—reducing the need for a debugger somewhat.
The IDEs all call Ant directly, rather than going through the normal launcher scripts. This has some consequences: