The ant build tool was built especially for Java projects around the year 2000. The aim of Java to be a write-once-run-anywhere language needed a tool that can also be used in different environments. Although make is available on Unix machines, and Windows as well, Makefiles were not always compatible. There was a small problem with the use of the tab character that some editors replaced with space, rendering Makefile unusable, but this was not the major reason. The main problem with make that ignited the development of Ant is that the commands are shell commands. Even if the implementation of the make program was made to be compatible on different operating systems, the used commands were many times incompatible, and that was something make itself could not change. Because make issues external commands to build the targets, developers are free to use any external tool that is available for them on the development machine. Another machine using the same operating system just may not have the same set of tools invoked by make. This undermines the portability of the make built projects.

At the same time, Ant is following the major principles of make. There are targets that may depend on each other and there are commands that need to be executed in an appropriate sequence to create the targets one after the other, following the dependency order. The description of the dependencies and the commands is XML (tab issue solved) and the commands are implemented in Java (system dependency is solved, well... more or less).

As Ant is neither part of the operating system nor the JDK, you will have to download and install it separately if you want to use it.