duction">Introduction</a></h1>
<p>Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like
<i>make</i>, without <i>make</i>'s wrinkles.</p>
<h3>Why?</h3>
<p>Why another build tool when there is already
<i>make</i>,
<i>gnumake</i>,
<i>nmake</i>,
<i>jam</i>,
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 execut