It is important to focus on the concepts, not so much on the implementation. Examples are provided where applicable, but lack of detailed code is intentional. In this article, we'll look at a few advanced techniques that can unleash the true powers of Ant, and turn this mere build tool into an indispensable enterprise asset.

Ant gained popularity because of its simplicity, extensibility and cross platform support and within a short span of time has become the build tool of choice for a large number of commercial and open source projects alike.Īlthough Ant has been extremely successful as an enterprise build management tool, most Ant implementations do not use some of the advanced features provided by the tool. Since then it has brought the words 'build' and 'manageability' closer than ever. In January of 2000, the Ant tool, which was created by James Duncan Davidson to build his Apache project called Tomcat, was moved out of the Tomcat source and into a separate Apache project. This January Ant celebrated its 6 th year birthday.

Apache ant stands for