Ant is the premiere build management tool for use in Java environments. Unlike traditional build management tools such as GNU Make, Ant is itself written in Java, is platform independent, and interfaces well with the utilities in Sun's Java software development kit (SDK). In addition to being platform independent, Ant is also independent of the integrated development environment (IDE) being used. IDE independence is important for open source projects (or other projects) in which the various developers might use different IDEs. Using Ant, Java developers can: Define build chunks, the results that they must produce, and the dependencies between them Automatically retrieve source code from source control systems such as PVCS Build applications by havin...