History
Ant ("Another Neat Tool") was conceived by James Duncan Davidson while turning a product from Sun into open source. That product, Sun's reference JSP/Servlet engine, later became Apache Tomcat. A proprietary version of make was used to build it on the Solaris Operating Environment, but in the open source world there was no way of controlling which platform was used to build Tomcat. Ant was created as a simple platform-independent tool to build Tomcat from directives in an XML "build file". Ant (version 1.1) was officially released as a stand-alone product on July 19, 2000.
Several proposals for an Ant version 2 have been made, such as AntEater by James Duncan Davidson, Myrmidon by Peter Donald and Mutant by Conor MacNeill, none of which were able to find large acceptance with the developer community.
Today, Ant is the build tool used by most Java development projects. For example, most open source Java developers include build.xml files with their distribution.
Because Ant made it trivial to integrate JUnit tests with the build process, Ant has made it easy for willing developers to adopt test-driven development, and even Extreme Programming.
Read more about this topic: Apache Ant
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