Ant vs Batch files

[Naren Chivukula]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me what all we can do using Ant that can't be done using batch files? As I'm new to Ant tool, tell me the areas where Ant is powerful compared to batch files

Regards,
Narendranath

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Naren,
A few advantages of Ant over batch files:

platform independence - you can develop on Windows and run a build on UNIX/LINUX

integrates into IDEs - you can run the build from the IDE or command line

knowledge - more people know Ant than advanced batch scripting

support - since Ant is standard, there are many extensions and custom tasks

more powerful tasks - how easy is it to send out an e-mail in a batch file?

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Naren Chivukula:
Can anyone tell me what all we can do using Ant that can't be done using batch files?

Nothing, in the same sense as that you can't do anything in Java that couldn't be done using Assembler instead.

[Tim Holloway]

More accurately, there's a whole raft of things that are trivial in Ant that are difficult or even impossible in that rather feeble scripting language used for Windows batch files (I'm assuming that's what you meant and not the more powerful Unix shell scripting, though Ant has advantages even there).

Just aside from providing an intelligent and extensible build environment for Java, Ant scripts also have minimal OS dependency. If you want to create or delete a directory, for example, the same Ant task works under both Windows and Unix.

I have, in fact, some ant buildfiles that allow me to do development under Windows, then export the entire project to Solaris, where I rerun them and they detect the Solaris OS and build Solaris install packages. One of my projects also understands that when it's running under Linux, it's supposed to build an RPM.