What is ant in j2ee?

Question

What is ant in j2ee?

Answer 1

Ant is a small animal who can build magnificent buildings. Ant builds! ANT is a Java based building tool, which is similar to make, and so much better than make.ANT, what a smart name for a building tool, even the original author of ANT, James Duncan Davidson, meant "Another Neat Tool"

Answer 2

Ant is a build management xml based scripting language and tool that is used mostly to compile java programs and create jar files for them.



Ant is much better than a shell script because it is Java aware, and has some understanding of dependency etc.



Ant isn't J2EE specific. But it makes a lot of sense for J2EE development, because J2EE programs are written and built in a different path location from where they are executed.



For normal desktop or server Java software that isn't enterprise based, Ant is still recommended as the preferred building solution over command line scripts.



Of late another build management software called Maven is taking over. It has built-in support for unit testing using JUnit and automatic dependency management.



Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking, but I'm guessing you're talking about Apache Ant, which stands for "Another Neat Tool".



Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to make but is written in the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects.



The most immediately noticeable difference between Ant and make is that Ant uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, whereas make has its Makefile format. By default the XML file is named build.xml.



Ant is an Apache project. It is open source software, and is released under the Apache Software License.



See the source for additional information as well as a source file...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Ant