Ant

Looking up Ant tutorials, I came across this picture.  O'Reilly, being famous for having animals in their books, decided to use a lizard instead of an ant for Ant.  I guess it proves they pick animals at random and print the books.

Using Ant, I saw how easy it was to deploy development source code on different systems.  Being a build system, Ant serves this purpose very well. Since Ant is separate from any IDE, it makes open source projects at lot less painful to work with since distribution is standardized and removes human error.  It even verifies the build for you and it is a script you could switch out.  Build systems like Ant will also fill in the holes for you by downloading missing libraries.

Most of the commands available to me were simple and easy to master.  It's versatility knows no bounds, because it has a command to create zip files by itself.  It is also possible to create a new directory with the zip command by itself, where other commands would give me if I tried the same.  Ant also allows me to create my own commands which I can use to do specific actions on my build, such as creating a lighter version of my build.  The dependencies are very convenient and is more open than extend in Java since it allows multiple targets.

Although, I find the interchanging between "name" and "dir" disorienting whenever I create a target or directory.  Despite the fact that Eclipse claimed it has Ant supported, it seemed like it was never fully thought out.  It took me a while to enable Ant formatting before I decided to restart Eclipse for it to recognize it as an Ant file.