# Apache Ant - Welcome
Author: Conor MacNeill

| the Apache Ant site |

| Home |

| Projects |

# Welcome

### Ant 1.8.0RC1

### January 12, 2010 - Ant 1.8.0RC1 Available

Apache Ant 1.8.0RC1 is now available for download .

- a new top level element extension-point allows build files to be extended with custom targets more easily
- if and unless attributes will be evaluated according to the values of the properties entered if these properties evaluate to true, false, on, off
- Ant now requires Java 1.4 or later
- new task include provides an alternative to <import> that should be preferred when you don't want to override any targets
- numerous bug fixes and improvements as documented in Bugzilla and in WHATSNEW

### Ivy 2.1.0

### October 8, 2009 - Apache Ivy 2.1.0 Released

Apache Ivy 2.1.0 is now available for download as source or binary (with and without dependencies) from http://ant.apache.org/ivy/download.cgi.

Key features of the 2.1.0 release are

- enhanced Maven2 compatibility, with several bug fixes and more pom features covered
- new options for the Ivy Ant tasks and commandline
- configuration intersections and configuration groups
- numerous bug fixes and improvements as documented in Jira and in the release notes

For more information see the Ivy home page.

### AntUnit 1.1

### September 26, 2008 - Apache AntUnit 1.1 Released

Apache AntUnit 1.1 Beta is now available for download as binary or source release.

In addition to a few bugfixes and some new assertions AntUnit 1.1 allows test listeners to receive the log output of the project under test. Both plainlistener and xmllistener have an option that makes them echo the project's output into their respective logs.

For more information see the Antlib's home page

### Apache Ivy is an Ant Sub-Project Now!

### October 11, 2007 - Apache Ivy is an Ant Sub-Project Now!

Apache Ivy, "A Java based tool for tracking, resolving and managing project dependencies.", just finished Incubation and has joined the Ant project. More information will be available from the Ant site soon.

Until we've finished the migration, you can learn more about Ivy from its Incubator website.

### Apache Ant

Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, but without Make's wrinkles.

Why another build tool when there is already make, gnumake, nmake, jam, and others? Because all those tools have limitations that Ant's original author couldn't live with when developing software across multiple platforms. Make-like tools are inherently shell-based -- they evaluate a set of dependencies, then execute commands not unlike what you would issue in a shell. This means that you can easily extend these tools by using or writing any program for the OS that you are working on. However, this also means that you limit yourself to the OS, or at least the OS type such as Unix, that you are working on.

Makefiles are inherently evil as well. Anybody who has worked on them for any time has run into the dreaded tab problem. "Is my command not executing because I have a space in front of my tab!!!" said the original author of Ant way too many times. Tools like Jam took care of this to a great degree, but still have yet another format to use and remember.

Ant is different. Instead of a model where it is extended with shell-based commands, Ant is extended using Java classes. Instead of writing shell commands, the configuration files are XML-based, calling out a target tree where various tasks get executed. Each task is run by an object that implements a particular Task interface.

Granted, this removes some of the expressive power that is inherent by being able to construct a shell command such as ``find . -name foo -exec rm {}``, but it gives you the ability to be cross platform -- to work anywhere and everywhere. And hey, if you really need to execute a shell command, Ant has an `<exec>` task that allows different commands to be executed based on the OS that it is executing on.

### Documentation

You can view the documentation for the current release (Apache Ant 1.8.0RC1) online

Comprehensive documentation is included in the source and binary distributions.

### Get Involved

- Get Involved
- Join Mailing Lists
- Search the Dev Mailing List
- Search the User Mailing List