Java Projects - Second Edition

Ant

The ant build tool was built especially for Java projects around the year 2000. The aim of Java to be a write-once-run-anywhere language needed a tool that can also be used in different environments. Although make is available on Unix machines, and Windows as well, Makefiles were not always compatible. There was a small problem with the use of the tab character that some editors replaced with space, rendering Makefile unusable, but this was not the major reason. The main problem with make that ignited the development of Ant is that the commands are shell commands. Even if the implementation of the make program was made to be compatible, running on different operating systems, the used commands were many times incompatible, and that was ...