Key facts
- Original author
- James Duncan Davidson
- Developer
- Apache Software Foundation
- Initial release
- 19 July 2000 ; 25 years ago ( 2000-07-19 )
- Stable release
- 1.10.16 / April 1, 2026 ; 2 months ago ( 2026-04-01 )
- Written in
- Java
- Platform
- Java SE
- Type
- Build tool
- License
- Apache License 2.0
- Website
- ant .apache .org
- Repository
- Ant Repository
via Wikipedia infobox
~10 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes for Java applications which originated from the Apache Tomcat project in early 2000 as a replacement for the Make build tool of Unix. It is similar to Make, but is implemented using the Java language and requires the Java platform. Unlike Make, which uses the Makefile format, Ant uses XML to describe the code build process and its dependencies.
Released under an Apache License by the Apache Software Foundation, Ant is an open-source project.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Apache Ant” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.