posted 19 years ago
Ant is a build system to automate your software building process (ha!). Basically, a way to look at it is: if you have multiple steps that you need to manually perform in order to build and deploy your software code, ant allows you to automate (and thereby reduce chances of error) the process. For example: you could compile your code, jar it/war it up, deploy it in your app server and also startup your app as well - all using ant.
hope this helps