Editing Apache Ant (section)

==History==
Ant ("Another Neat Tool")<ref>{{cite web | url=https://ant.apache.org/faq.html#ant-name | title=Why do you call it Ant? – Apache Ant FAQ}}</ref> was conceived by James Duncan Davidson while preparing [[Sun Microsystems]]'s [[reference implementation|reference]] [[JavaServer Pages|JSP]] and [[Servlet]] engine, later [[Apache Tomcat]], for release as [[Open-source software|open-source]]. A [[proprietary software|proprietary]] version of Make was used to build it on the [[Solaris (operating system)|Solaris]] platform, but in the open-source world, there was no way of controlling which platform was used to build Tomcat; so Ant was created as a simple [[platform-independent]] tool to build Tomcat from directives in an XML "build file". Ant (version 1.1) was officially released as a stand-alone product on July 19, 2000.

Several proposals for an Ant version 2 have been made, such as AntEater by James Duncan Davidson, Myrmidon by Peter Donald <ref>Peter Donald.
[http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/core/tags/ANT_13_B1/proposal/myrmidon/src/xdocs/design.html "Myrmidon: The Ant2.0 Proposal"].</ref> and Mutant by Conor MacNeill, none of which were able to find large acceptance with the developer community.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://codefeed.com/blog/?p=98 | title=The Early History of Ant Development | first=Conor | last=MacNeill| date=4 August 2005 }}</ref>

At one time (2002), Ant was the build tool used by most Java development projects.<ref>{{cite book | title=Java Tools for eXtreme Programming | author=Wiley | year=2002 | page=76}}</ref> For example, most open source Java developers included <code>build.xml</code> files with their distribution.{{Citation needed|date=March 2010}} Because Ant made it trivial to integrate [[JUnit]] tests with the build process, Ant allowed developers to adopt [[test-driven development]] and [[extreme programming]].

In 2004 Apache created a new tool with a similar purpose called [[Apache Maven|Maven]]. 

[[Gradle]], which is similar software, was created in 2008, which in contrary uses [[Apache Groovy|Groovy]] (and a few other languages) code instead of XML.