Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes which originated from the

Apache Tomcat Apache Tomcat (called "Tomcat" for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also ...

project in early 2000 as a replacement for the Make build tool of Unix. It is similar to Make, but is implemented using the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

language and requires the Java platform. Unlike Make, which uses the Makefile format, Ant uses

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

to describe the code build process and its dependencies. Released under an Apache License by the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

, Ant is an open-source project.

History

Ant ("Another Neat Tool") was conceived by

James Duncan Davidson James Duncan Davidson is an American software developer and photographer. He's currently the Technology Advisor to Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify. While a software engineer at Sun Microsystems (1997–2001), Davidson created Tomcat, a Java-bas ...

while preparing

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

reference Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a '' name'' ...

JSP and Servlet engine, later

, for release as

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

. A

proprietary {{Short pages monitor