Apache Ant is the venerable old build system for the Java world. Arguably, Ant has been superseded in features and benefits by another Apache project, Maven. Ant still has a significant following and still is the de facto building standard for a lot of projects. Both systems now have Groovy scripting support in the form of Gant for Ant and GMaven for Maven. In this section we will be taking a look at Gant.
Ant was developed by The Apache Software Foundation. Ant was designed as a replacement for command-like make tools such as make and nmake. Ant was written in Java, so unlike other make tools it runs across platforms. Ant build scripts are written in XML. Build files contain one project and many target elements that can be defined to have dependencies on each other. Each target element will define one or more task elements, which are responsible for doing the actual work.
One benefit of Ant over existing make tools is that instead of invoking shell commands directly, Ant implements...