Apache Ant Tutorial

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Apache ANT Tutorial
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Apache Ant is a Java based build tool from Apache Software Foundation. Apache Ant's build files are written in XML and take advantage of the open standard, portable and easy to understand nature of XML. For more detail kindly check

tutorialspoint.com/ant

Why do you need a build tool?
Before diving deep into the definition of Apache Ant, one must understand the need for a build tool. Why do I need Ant, or more specifically, why do I need a build tool?
Do you spend your day doing the following manually?

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Compile code
Package the binaries
Deploy the binaries to the test server
Test your changes
Copy code from one location to another

If you have answered yes to any of the above, then it is time to automate the process and take away that burden from you.
On average, a developer spends 3 hours (out of a 8 hour working day) doing mundane tasks like build and deployment. Wouldn't you be delighted to get back the 3 hours?
Enter Apache Ant. Apache Ant is an operating system build and deployment tool that can be executed from a command line.

Features of Apache Ant
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Ant is the most complete Java build and deployment tool available.
Ant is platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators. Ant can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command.
Ant scripts are written using plain XML. If you are already familiar with XML, you can learn Ant pretty quickly.
Ant is good at automating complicated repetitive tasks.
Ant comes with a big list of predefined tasks.
Ant provides an interface to develop custom tasks.
Ant can be easily invoked from the command line and it can integrate with free and commercial IDEs.

Installing Apache Ant
It is assumed that you have already downloaded and installed Java Development Kit (JDK) on your computer. If not, please follow the instructions here.