Chapter 1. Introducing Ant
This chapter covers:
Welcome to the future of your build process.
This is a book about Ant. It’s more than just a reference book for Ant syntax, it’s a collection of best practices demonstrating how to use Ant to its greatest potential in real-world situations. If used well, you can develop and deliver your software projects better than you have done before.
Let’s start with a simple question: what is Ant?
Ant is a build tool, a small program designed to help software teams develop big programs by automating all the drudge-work tasks of compiling code, running tests, and packaging the results for redistribution. Ant is written in Java and is designed to be cross-platform, easy to use, extensible, and scalable. It can be used in a small personal project, or it can be used in a large, multiteam software project. It aims to automate your entire build process.