Why use ANT

[ravian]

I read about ANT which is used for compilation of Java projects. I am not sure why we should use ANT? In Eclipse we can easily compile everything. I think ANT is an old technology. Correct me if I am wrong.

Cheers.

[rajiv_bang]

Eclipse is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which will help a developer code and test his/her code.

ANT, on the other hand, is a build tool/framework. ANT is used during the deployment stage.

Let me try to explain this in simple terms -
When I write a piece of code, I do that in Eclipse and Eclipse does make it easier to compile. Rarely would a software solution have only one Java class. There would be hundreds of Java classes that one would write.

When these hundreds of classes that make up the solution have to be deployed in a production environment, there are many tasks one has to do apart from compiling. For eg. the compiled classes have to be bundled into jar files. If there are any property files or configuration XMLs, those have to be placed in an appropriate directory or in a jar file.

All these can be done fairly easily with ANT. These can be done from inside Eclipse if you have an ANT plugin installed with Eclipse.

HTH.