Awesomely Nifty Thing

   There are many tools in the programming world that help make things easier to do. Let me introduce you to this awesomely nifty thing by taking it's acronym: ANT. What is ANT? Well for starters it doesn't mean awesomely nifty thing like the title states it to be nor it is those tiny black creatures you find on your picnic. What is it then? ANT actually stands for Another Neat Tool… Yeah, my title might seem similar to its actual name, but hey, Ant is both awesomely nifty and neat.
     Developed by the Apache Software Foundation, Ant is a tool for automating software build processes. I'm not going into much detail what a build system does, but basically it is scripting that can compile, package, test, create documentation and deploy code.
     Ant is like a programming language that uses XML which I don't have much experience with, so to test out the functionalities of Ant… Yes, you guessed it, Code Katas. The total of eight Ant Code Katas creates the HelloAnt Program. Overall, these katas did show me the basics of Ant. The first three katas introduced printing to the console, the immutable properties of ant and dependencies which are conditions. The rest of the katas mixed in a bit of java with the scripting. With the help of the Ant API, it was fairly simple to compile, create javadoc and package the entire directory. These scripts are just simple shortcuts that otherwise someone would type manually in the console and they save time.