You may have heard of Ant in the Java development world. Being a pure Java tool, Ant is often called ‘the Java version of make’. With Ant, you create scripts called build files that are interpreted by the Ant parser. These scripts aid you in Java development by compiling your code and deploying it in your build directory. For both small home-grown projects and large Java enterprise environments, Ant has become an absolutely critical tool for Java developers. In the PHP world, though, we do not have any code to compile, and often, FTP is adequate for moving files into production. Why, then, as PHP developers, do we care about Ant?
In some business environments, production web servers are tightly controlled. Developers are not allowed anywhere near the servers, let alone pushing out code at their whim. The sheer act of deploying new code often occurs only after a long ritual of meetings and approvals at various levels. In these environments, deployment...