Ant or Gant?

Gant is a build tool that uses both Groovy and Ant. With Gant, you describe your build process using Groovy scripts. Stated simply, Gant allows you to specify the build logic using Groovy instead of XML. The next thing you may ask is " Is Gant a competitor to Ant?". Let me quote from the Gant web site to make thing more clear here :

Whilst it might be seen as a competitor to Ant, Gant uses Ant tasks for many of the actions, so Gant is really an alternative way of doing builds using Ant, but using a programming language rather than XML to specify the build rules.
 

 Download and Install Gant.

In order for Gant to work, you should have Groovy installed. You can download and follow the installation instructions for Groovy here.

As I said earlier also, in order to use Gant, you should have knowledge of Groovy as well. If you have never written Groovy code before, there are many interesting books on Groovy like:

1. Groovy in Action

2. Groovy Recipes

3. Groocy Refcardz

You can also read the getting started guide on the Groovy web site, which should give you a good starting point.

Download the latest version of Gant from here.  Gant is currently at version 1.4.0. Unzip it to a folder. If you already have your GROOVY_HOME  set, that's all you need to use Gant.

Getting Started. Open a console, and type gant. You should see a message as shown below:

meera-subbaraos-macbook-9:~ meerasubbarao$ gant
Cannot open file build.gant
meera-subbaraos-macbook-9:~ meerasubbarao$ 

You are all set at this point to use Gant in your projects.

Help Information: Open a console, and type gant -h. This will provide you with all the necessary help information you need as shown below:

meera-subbaraos-macbook-9:CodeMetricsProject meerasubbarao$ gant -h
usage: gant [option]* [target]*
 -c,--usecache                Whether to cache the generated class and
                              perform modified checks on the file before re-compilation.
 -n,--dry-run                 Do not actually action any tasks.
 -C,--cachedir <cache-file>   The directory where to cache generated
                              classes to.
 -D <name>=<value>            Define <name> to have value <value>.
                              Creates a variable named <name> for use in the scripts and a property
                              named <name> for the Ant tasks.
 -L,--lib <path>              Add a directory to search for jars and
                              classes.
 -P,--classpath <path>        Specify a path to search for jars and
                              classes.
 -T,--targets                 Print out a list of the possible targets.
 -V,--version                 Print the version number and exit.
 -d,--debug                   Print debug levels of information.
 -f,--file <build-file>       Use the named build file instead of the
                              default, build.gant.
 -h,--help                    Print out this message.
 -l,--gantlib <library>       A directory that contains classes to be used
                              as extra Gant modules,
 -p,--projecthelp             Print out a list of the possible targets.
 -q,--quiet                   Do not print out much when executing.
 -s,--silent                  Print out nothing when executing.
 -v,--verbose                 Print lots of extra information.

Create a new file called build.gant at the root of your project.

Did a similarity between Ant and Gant strike you here? Ant build files are usually called build.xml, and they are created as a common practice within the root of your project folder as well.