Ant
Ant is a Java-based, open-source tool that is provided by the Apache Foundation. It
can
be used to declare a sequence of build actions. It is well suited for both development
and
document builds. The full-easy-install version of the toolkit ships with a copy of
Ant.
The DITA-OT uses Ant to manage the XSLT scripts that are used to perform the various transformation; it also uses Ant to manage intermediate steps that are written in Java.
The most important Ant script is the build.xml
file. This script defines
and combines common pre-processing and output transformation routines; it also defines
the
DITA-OT extension points.