
One of the obvious signs of Ant's success is that all the popular IDEs, from the Open Source -Emacs JDE, Eclipse, NetBeans and jEdit - to the commercial: IntelliJ IDEA, Borland JBuilder- all ship with built in Ant support. Indeed, pretty much the only competitor in the Java space is a sibling project under the Apache banner, Maven.

Ant is one of the best ways to do it in Java, and, over the past four years, it has moved from a tool used simply to build Tomcat cross-platform, to a tool used across many open source projects, and now to a tool used by almost all Java projects. If the Apache organization had a tea room, those Ant awards would be forcing all the other (excellent) Apache products to fight hard for their cabinet space.Īll those awards come for a reason: everyone, at least everyone working on any project of moderate complexity, needs to control their build process. Aardman Animations keep all their Wallace and Gromit -related oscars in a cabinet in their tea room.

The JavaWorld Editors' Choice Award for "Most Useful Java Community-Developed Technology", The Java Developer's Journal "Editors Choice Award", and Java Pro Reader's Choice award for "Most Valuable Java Deployment Technology." Wow. But if you do have to get software out on time -"roughly what you asked for, roughly when you asked", then Ant1.6 provides lots of little improvements over the existing version.īefore we look at those details, lets look at the world of The Automated Build.įirstly, we'd like to thank everyone for all those awards that have been flowing in. No, Ant1.6 will not fundamentally change your life. Nor is a new release of Ant likely to provide a fundamental kick-start to the currently somewhat subdued technology and software industries.

Nor is it going to take less time to write your Java code -although we note that running XDoclet under Ant lets you avoid writing so much code. Your social life isn't going to be helped, though with any luck you may now have more time for one.
