Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org/) is a build tool along the lines of Make, especially for Java projects. It is written in Java, and hence provides the ability for teams already using Java to extend their build tool using Java as well. However, Ant is not limited to Java projects alone and can be used to build any source code, including .NET, Python, and Ruby.
The build files in Ant are written using XML, and one of the main features of Ant is its cross-platform nature. We will first cover some basics of Ant, including installation, a sample build file, and getting Ant to build our Java source code in a developer workstation, before proceeding to set up Ant builds on TeamCity.
Ant packages can be downloaded from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi. Installing Ant involves extracting the downloaded package and adding the bin directory to the PATH environment variable. Also, the ANT_HOME environment variable has to be set up, pointing to the extracted...