ANT Vs Maven

Let’s get this started…🤓

Both are two popular build tools used by the Java community.

In short, though Maven and ANT build tools the main difference is that maven also provides dependency management, standard project layout, and project management.

ANT is a well-known build tool, probably the oldest among all. A build tool is used to create deliverables like JAR file or WAR file from Java source and resources for deployment.

Maven came after ANT and offers much more than a build tool.

MAVEN Provides help with managing

✓Builds

✓Documentation

✓Reporting

✓Dependencies

✓Releases

✓Distribution

In Ant, all the dependent libraries should be copied manually to the project location to set up the project.

Next, I’ll focus on what ??

Maven Build Lifecycle

There are three built-in life cycles:

• default: the main life cycle as it’s responsible for project deployment

• clean: to clean the project and remove all files generated by the previous build
• site: to create the project’s site documentation

Let’s see the…

Maven Phase

• Validate: check if all information necessary for the build is available

• Compile: compile the source code

• Test-compile: compile the test source code

• Test: run unit tests

• Package: package compiled source code into the distributable format (jar, war, …)

• Integration-test: process and deploy the package if needed to run integration tests
• Install: Install the package to a local repository
• Deploy: copy the package to the remote repository

Now let’s try to understand the differences 🤓

The main difference between ANT and Maven

The main difference between ANT and Maven is that In ANT you need to define everything i.e. source directory, build directory, target directory, etc while Maven adopts the principle of Convention over configuration. This means Maven has a predefined project structure i.e. standard directory for source files, test files, and resources. Maven and ANT is that Maven requires less configuration than ANT because it works on the principle of convention over configuration and assumes reasonable default

Another significant difference between Maven and ANT is dependency Management. Maven introduced the concept of the repository, which is a central place to store all libraries, JARs, etc. Maven allows you to use a central maven repository as well as a local repository and automatically download dependency during the build process.

The third and most important difference between Maven and ANT is that Maven offers a consistent and common interface to build Java projects.

All you need to do is download the project and run mvn install to build it. Also by knowing maven conventions and looking at pom.xml, one can easily understand where source files are and what are project dependencies.

See you guys in the next article! ❤️ ✌

Got any doubts/questions/suggestions? Comment down below.