Is it necessary to learn Ant ?

[Qisen Jia]

now i am using eclipse
and it's a great IDE
but i find that many people are using Ant
do i need to learn Ant

[Jelle Klap]

Perhaps not strictly necessary, but definitely useful!
When an application grows in size and complexity and the build process becomes more involved, you'll want to implement some form of build automation.
ANT has been specifically designed, and is used extensively, for this purpose.

[Nandini Bhaduri]

Depends on what you want to do. If you are going for a even moderately sized java application I would suggest you learn Ant. It makes life easier. Its an excellent tool.

[Lester Burnham]

Ant is not an IDE - it's a build tool. So while there's some overlap with IDEs -like compilation, creating jar/war files and javadocs, running JUnit tests etc.- Ant goes further in terms of custom bundling and deployment options. It can also be run as part of batch jobs, or as part of a build server.

I generally insist on an Ant script (or several) that can create everything from just the repository contents; experience has taught me not to rely on IDEs for that. Whatever other tools the developers use -even if each one prefers a different IDE- is secondary to that.

[Qisen Jia]

Lester Burnham wrote:Ant is not an IDE - it's a build tool. So while there's some overlap with IDEs -like compilation, creating jar/war files and javadocs, running JUnit tests etc.- Ant goes further in terms of custom bundling and deployment options. It can also be run as part of batch jobs, or as part of a build server.

I generally insist on an Ant script (or several) that can create everything from just the repository contents; experience has taught me not to rely on IDEs for that. Whatever other tools the developers use -even if each one prefers a different IDE- is secondary to that.

There is something wrong with my expression,I know that Ant is not an IDE,
and we all know that Ant and IDE(like eclipse) can build a java project
so I want to know do I still need to learn how to use Ant to build a project?

think of your suggestion
at last I deciede to learn Ant
thanks a lot!

[Rob Spoor]

Need to, no. Want to, definitely!

Almost everything you can do with Ant you can do directly on the command line as well, but it's going to involve a lot of typing. Yes, a shell script can do (almost) the same, but Ant's XML configuration makes it easier (at least to me).