Talk:Apache Ant/Getting Started/Installation

Prerequisites
The ant manual contains the following statements. I have edited text on this page which conflicts with this:

To build and use Ant, you must have a JAXP-compliant XML parser installed and available on your classpath, such as Xerces.

The binary distribution of Ant includes the latest version of the Apache Xerces2 XML parser. Please see http://java.sun.com/xml/ for more information about JAXP. If you wish to use a different JAXP-compliant parser, you should remove xercesImpl.jar and xml-apis.jar from Ant's lib directory.

You can then either put the JARs of your preferred parser into Ant's lib directory or put the jars on the system classpath. Some parts of Ant will fail if you use an old parser, especially one that is not namespace-aware. In particular, avoid the Crimson parser.

Tip: "ant -diagnostics" will list the XML parser used and its location.

For the current version of Ant, you will also need a JDK installed on your system, version 1.2 or later required, 1.5 or later strongly recommended. The later the version of Java, the more Ant tasks you get.

Note #2: If a JDK is not present, only the JRE runtime, then many tasks will not work.

RayGates 19:53, 2 March 2007 (UTC)