In 2004 Apache created a new tool with a similar purpose called Maven. Because Ant made it trivial to integrate JUnit tests with the build process, Ant allowed developers to adopt test-driven development and extreme programming. For example, most open source Java developers included build.xml files with their distribution. Īt one time (2002), Ant was the build tool used by most Java development projects. Several proposals for an Ant version 2 have been made, such as AntEater by James Duncan Davidson, Myrmidon by Peter Donald Īnd Mutant by Conor MacNeill, none of which were able to find large acceptance with the developer community. Ant (version 1.1) was officially released as a stand-alone product on July 19, 2000. A proprietary version of Make was used to build it on the Solaris platform, but in the open-source world, there was no way of controlling which platform was used to build Tomcat so Ant was created as a simple platform-independent tool to build Tomcat from directives in an XML 'build file'. Released under an Apache License by the Apache Software Foundation, Ant is an open-source project.Īnt ('Another Neat Tool') was conceived by James Duncan Davidson while preparing Sun Microsystems's reference JSP and Servlet engine, later Apache Tomcat, for release as open-source. Unlike Make, which uses the Makefile format, Ant uses XML to describe the code build process and its dependencies. It is similar to Make, but is implemented using the Java language and requires the Java platform.

October 19, 2021 16 months ago ( ) Īpache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes which originated from the Apache Tomcat project in early 2000 as a replacement for the Make build tool of Unix.

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