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| <title>Apache Ant User Manual—Introduction</title> |
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| <body> |
| <h1 id="introduction">Introduction</h1> |
| <p>Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like |
| <em>make</em>, without <em>make</em>'s wrinkles.</p> |
| <h3>Why?</h3> |
| <p>Why another build tool when there is already |
| <em>make</em>, |
| <em>gnumake</em>, |
| <em>nmake</em>, |
| <em>jam</em>, |
| 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 on 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.</p> |
| <p>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.</p> |
| <p>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.</p> |
| <p>Granted, this removes some of the expressive power that is inherent in being |
| able to construct a shell command such as |
| <code>`find . -name foo -exec rm {}`</code>, 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 |
| <code><exec></code> task that |
| allows different commands to be executed based on the OS it is executing |
| on.</p> |
| |
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