What is an ant? A six-legged insect that annoys you like no tomorrow during a family outing? Well, yes, but in this case an ant is a type of test we software programmers use to run a series of commands in an attempt make sure our program is working correctly.
Prior to learning how to use use ant to do debugging, I used "make" to create similar things, but could only be used in a Linux environment. What was nice about ant, is that it is able to be used over multiple platforms, specifically when it comes to the forward slash in Mac/Linux and the backslash in Windows. This was something I really liked as both platforms are used in the professional environment.
The biggest thing I think I learned from working on these ant kata was how much time the script could potentially save you when building large systems that would normally require you to be constantly typing things in to the terminal. It took me quite some time to get started as I didn't know much XML and the syntax is totally different from any other programming language; it is more similar to HTML actually. However, once I got the hang of things, figuring things out was pretty simple. Apache even has a manual online that lists all the attributes of the tasks and an explanation of each. This was a very significant help in completing these kata.
Link to the manual: http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/
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