Apache Ant Reviews & Product Details

I liked the easy-to-use commands from the terminal. We can keep all the jar files needed to build a project in the lib folder because of this anyone looking into the lib folder can say what libraries are used to develop a particular project. It also provides automating the things as per our requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing as such to dislike as of now. The only thing is we have to put jar files manually in the folder ourselves. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Used for developing the software and automating the things Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fcaed nothing as of now. It is the best one till used Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We run a complicated SaaS application. The site itself doesn't need to be built or complied but the database, settings, and integration with other software needs to be configured for development or production environments. This used to be a tedious task requiring many steps which lead developers to all have their own unique procedures. When we finally got around to automating the entire setup with ant, we got all developers on the same page. Now we can deploy a complete instance of the application for testing with a few scrips and we know everyone is working off the same build. Its even allowed non-technical staff to deploy previews of builds on their own systems with just some basic commands. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ant scripts are written in XML which can be overly verbose and a little confusion some times. The limited lack of error handling and reporting can also make writing and testing scripts slightly more complicated they possibly needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apache ant serves its purpose well. It is a great learning tool and accompanying resource for java. Programming can be frustrating when something isn't working. Apache ant is a great resource to turn to for fixing and improving your work in java. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish the format was more modern. The site itself is a bit outdated, though this does not affect the quality of the information. They could also consider expanding to offer information about other programming languages. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ant is an imperative build system, this means that it's very good at controlling the build process. You "tell" Ant what to do during the whole process, for example: "compile these files and put them in that folder". This is great for special projects where you want as much control as possible during the build process.We can use the apache ant in the command line interface too,it is very user friendly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While it's true that Ant gives you a lot of freedom and control over your builds, it also means that you will have to constantly reinvent the wheel on how your project structure and how everything fits together for every new project. This also makes it harder for other people to simply start working on your project because of the wide range of different ways to build a project with Ant. While tools that have more constraints generally end up looking the same and it's easier to understand how everything fits.sometimes build conflicts will come,sometimes IDE suddenly getting crashed,Dependency management is required to full fill all other requirements Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Like java, it is platform independent.

It has a large variety of common tasks already catered for.

It is extensible: not that hard to create your own tasks.

the most popular build tool for Java projects Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is not as powerful as batch/shell scripts

It uses horrible XML as a programming language.

Based on procedural programming paradigm Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ant can basically build anything - or wrap the build of anything, really. It is highly customizable and configurable, and can be used for most any kind of software build process or automation, even mixing and matching different builds (c/c++, java, etc) and driving them from the same build tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Convention beats configuration, and there are a whole lot of other build tools out there that have established conventions, pluggable features, etc. With ant you have to "roll your own" system for most things, even for very lower level things. If you need to highly customize (i.e. do it differently from most everyone else doing the same or similar) and control every detail of your build, then ant will let you do it. But this isn't a best practice - the more you can follow convention for java builds (maven) or mixed builds (python wheels from makefiles, ruby tars from rake, etc) the more you will be able to get contemporary help and solutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It provides you an easy way to manage your whole project and build it into a working solution which is otherwise very difficult. It automates the whole process and also gives you option to deploy onto server in some cases eg deploying your WAR files on Apache servers.

Also, I like the HTTP hooks it has. It helps trigger events which are used by something else which is used somewhere else which somewhere else and thus helps a lot like to detect failures or success and generate reports etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It being a great tool still lacks on many features and might soon be replaced by other tools like gradle which are much more flexible. Also there can be improvement in its tutorials which are little scarce for a beginner , what i feel. Also, its integration with Eclipse IDE is not that great and comes with loads of errors.

There is a need to improve this tool so that it can catch up with its competitors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apache Ant is simple, no fuss and ridiculously easy to pick up. A few additional frameworks exist to provide functionality that makes it even more powerful, such as the conditionals, logic and dependency management. As a build tool, it is very customizable to perform any task you need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The problem with Ant is that is based off older technology back then, whose requirements did not involve a wholesome dependency management system. As such, it is now overtaken by Maven for dependency management, which is a key requirement for modern build tools. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's simple fast and works in any platform :) and its a open source too Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We have to manually get the remote repositories and it has uses XML scripting Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.