"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 on 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....
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."
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