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Apache Ant Tutorial

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Apache Ant Tutorial

Apache Ant Tutorial

Apache Ant tutorial provides basic and advanced concepts of Apache Ant technology. Our Apache Ant tutorial is designed for beginners and professionals.

Apache Ant is a Java library that is used to handle Microsoft Office Documents. Apache Ant is open source, can be used by JVM based programming languages.

What is Apache Ant

Apache Ant (Another Neat Tool) is an open source project started by Apache Software Foundation. Ant is a Java library and a software tool used for automate software build processes such as compile, run, test and assemble Java application. It is designed and developed by Apache Software Foundation and initially released on 19 July 2000.

It is a better alternate of Make build tool of Unix. Ant is written in Java and require JVM to build the Java projects.

Ant uses XML to describe build code and by default it’s XML file name is build.xml.

History

Apache Ant project was started by James Duncan Davidson. The project’s objective was to create simple platform independent tool to build Tomcat using XML directives. It’s first version 1.1 was released on July 19, 2000. Later on it is considered as one of the most demanding tool written in Java.

It’s latest version is 1.10.3 which was released on March 27, 2018.

By 2002, Ant was the most demanding build tool used by most Java development projects. Ant can also be used to build non-Java applications, written in C or C++.

Key Factors of Ant Success

  • Extensible Architecture
  • High Performance
  • Large Community
  • Backward Compatibility

Required Java Version

Ant Version Minimum Java Version
1.1 up to 1.5.4 1.1
1.6.0 up to 1.6.5 1.2
1.7.0 up to 1.7.1 1.3
1.8.0 up to 1.8.3 1.4
Any 1.9.x release and the git branch 1.9.x 1.5
Any 1.10.x release and the current git master branch 1.8

Apache Ant Version History

Version Released Year
1.1 19 July 2000
1.2 24 October 2000
1.3 3 March 2001
1.4 3 September 2001
1.4.1 11 October 2001
1.5 10 July 2002
1.5.1 3 October 2002
1.5.2 3 March 2003
1.5.3 9 April 2003
1.5.4 12 August 2003
1.6.0 18 December 2003
1.6.1 12 February 2004
1.6.2 16 July 2004
1.6.3 28 April 2005
1.6.4 19 May 2005
1.6.5 2 June 2005
1.7.0 19 December 2006
1.7.1 27 June 2008
1.8.0 8 February 2010
1.8.4 23 May 2012
1.9.0 07 March 2013
1.10.3 27 Mar 2018
1.10.4 22 Jun 2018

Apache Ant Index



Prerequisites

Before Learning Apache Ant, you must have the strong knowledge of Java and XML. You must also be familiar with Eclipse or NetBeans. All the examples in this tutorial has been tested on Eclipse IDE.

Audience

Our Apache Ant tutorial is designed to help beginners and professionals both.

Problems

We assure you that you will not find any kind of problem in this tutorial. However, if you find any, you can post into the contact form.

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