Preface to the First Edition

In early 2000, Steve took a sabbatical from HP Laboratories, taking a break from research into such areas as adaptive, context-aware laptops to build web services, a concept that was very much in its infancy at the time.

He soon discovered that he had entered a world of chaos. Business plans, organizations, underlying technologies—all could be changed at a moment’s notice. One technology that remained consistent from that year was Ant. In the Spring of 2000, it was being whispered that a “makefile killer” was being quietly built under the auspices of the Apache project: a new way to build Java code. Ant was already in use outside the Apache Tomcat group, its users finding that what was being whispered was true: it was a new way to develop with Java. Steve started exploring how to use it in web service projects, starting small and slowly expanding as his experience grew and as the tool itself added more functionality. Nothing he wrote that year ever got past the prototype stage; probably the sole successful deliverable of that period was the “Ant in Anger” paper included with Ant distributions.