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# Welcome

Ant Top Level Apache Project

### Ant Promoted to Top Level Apache Project

On November 18, 2002, the Apache board created the Apache Ant top level project. Ant has now migrated from the Jakarta project into an Apache project of its own. This is primarily an organizational change and will not affect the technical aspects of the project. Ant retains a strong association with the Apache Jakarta project. One effect of this change is that the Ant webpage is now located at http://ant.apache.org/

Apache Ant

Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, but without Make's wrinkles.

Why another build tool when there is already make, gnumake, nmake, jam, and others? Because all those tools have limitations that Ant's original author couldn't live with when developing software across multiple platforms. Make-like tools are inherently shell-based -- they evaluate a set of dependencies, then execute commands not unlike what you would issue in a shell. This means that you can easily extend these tools by using or writing any program for the OS that you are working on. However, this also means that you limit yourself to the OS, or at least the OS type such as Unix, that you are working on.

Makefiles are inherently evil as well. Anybody who has worked on them for any time has run into the dreaded tab problem. "Is my command not executing because I have a space in front of my tab!!!" said the original author of Ant way too many times. Tools like Jam took care of this to a great degree, but still have yet another format to use and remember.

Ant is different. Instead of a model where it is extended with shell-based commands, Ant is extended using Java classes. Instead of writing shell commands, the configuration files are XML-based, calling out a target tree where various tasks get executed. Each task is run by an object that implements a particular Task interface.

Granted, this removes some of the expressive power that is inherent by being able to construct a shell command such as ``find . -name foo -exec rm {}``, but it gives you the ability to be cross platform -- to work anywhere and everywhere. And hey, if you really need to execute a shell command, Ant has an `<exec>` task that allows different commands to be executed based on the OS that it is executing on.

Documentation

You can view the documentation for the current release (Apache Ant 1.5.2) online

Comprehensive documentation is included in the source and binary distributions.

Nightly Builds

If you wish to use the latest Ant features, you can try downloading a nightly build from here

Towards Ant2

We are currently hashing out design details for Ant2. Please read the latest Ant news for more details.

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