| A N T | |
| What is it? | |
| ----------- | |
| Ant is a Java based build tool. In theory it is kind of like "make" | |
| without makes wrinkles and with the full portability of pure java code. | |
| Why? | |
| ---- | |
| Why another build tool when there is already make, gnumake, nmake, jam, | |
| and others? Because all of those tools have limitations that its 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 and 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. | |
| 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 use yet another format to use and remember. | |
| Ant is different. Instead a model where it is extended with shell based | |
| commands, it 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 which | |
| 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 rule that allows different commands to be executed based on the OS | |
| that it is executing on. | |
| The Latest Version | |
| ------------------ | |
| Details of the latest version can be found on the Apache Jakarta | |
| Project web site <http://jakarta.apache.org/>. | |
| Documentation | |
| ------------- | |
| Documentation is available in HTML format, in the docs/ directory. | |
| For building see docs/manual/install.html#buildingant. | |
| For installing see docs/manual/install.html#installing. | |
| Licensing | |
| --------- | |
| This software is licensed under the terms you may find in the file | |
| named "LICENSE" in this directory. | |
| Thanks for using Ant. | |
| The Apache Jakarta Project | |
| <http://jakarta.apache.org/> |