Chapter 11. Integrating Ant with Eclipse

Ant is the premiere build tool for Java developers, and Eclipse is the premiere integrated development environment (IDE) for Java programmers. Eclipse is great at visual development, and Ant is great for builds. For that reason, the latest Eclipse version (3.0) comes with Ant 1.6.1 (the version of Ant this book was written with), and there's an extensive Ant interface in Eclipse.

Doesn't Ant have its own IDE? Well, sort of. Antidote, started in 2000, was supposed to have been the Ant IDE; see http://ant.apache.org/projects/antidote/index.html. Unfortunately, that project appears to be more or less moribund, largely because the big guys behind Eclipse have been integrating Ant into their IDE now.