More generally, Ant can be used to pilot any type of process which can be described in terms of targets and tasks.
Ant is written in Java. Users of Ant can develop their own antlibs containing Ant tasks and types, and are offered a large number of ready-made commercial or open-source antlibs.
Ant is extremely flexible and does not impose coding conventions or directory layouts to the Java projects which adopt it as a build tool.
Software development projects looking for a solution combining build tool and dependency management can use Ant in combination with Apache Ivy.
The Apache Ant project is part of the Apache Software Foundation.