Ant - technical definition

The primary build tool used in the Java environment to automate compiling, testing, packaging and deploying large Java projects. Written in Java itself, it is a utility that executes a file of XML-based commands, and all major Java development environments (IDEs) support it. Ant was created by James Davidson to automate compilations of the Apache project's Tomcat servlet engine. It was later used to build all Apache programs and migrated to the Java community.