Foreword to the First Edition
Ant started its life on a plane ride, as a quick little hack. Its inventor was Apache member James Duncan Davidson. It joined Apache as a minor adjunct—almost an afterthought, really—to the codebase contributed by Sun that later became the foundation of the Tomcat 3.0 series. The reason it was invented was simple: it was needed to build Tomcat.
Despite these rather inauspicious beginnings, Ant found a good home in Apache, and in a few short years it has become the de facto standard not only for open source Java projects, but also as part of a large number of commercial products. It even has a thriving clone targeting .NET.
In my mind four factors are key to Ant’s success: its extensible architecture, performance, ...
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