Chapter 2. Installation and Configuration
This chapter describes where to get Ant, explains the differences
between the various distributions, and covers the most common
installation scenarios. As a portable Java application, Ant works
very consistently on many different platforms. This should not be a
surprise, given that Ant was written as an alternative to
platform-specific make utilities. Most
differences manifest themselves in the Ant startup scripts, which are
understandably different on Windows and Unix systems. Once Ant is
installed and configured, it does a remarkable job of insulating you
from differences between platforms.
The Distribution
Ant is open source software from the Apache Software Foundation, available in binary and source forms.[5] It is available from the Ant home page located at http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/; you can choose either a release build or a nightly build. To ease installation, different distributions are provided for Unix and Windows systems.
The direct link to the list of nightly builds is http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-ant/nightly/. The nightly builds include the latest bug fixes and features, and are a constantly changing target. The vast majority of software development teams should opt instead for a release version of Ant, available at the following URLs:
- http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-ant/release/v1.4.1/bin/
The binary distribution.
- http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-ant/release/v1.4.1/src/
The source distribution ...
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