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System Requirements

Ant has been used successfully on many platforms, including Linux, commercial flavours of Unix such as Solaris and HP-UX, Windows 9x and NT, Novell Netware 6 and MacOS X. To build and use Ant, you must have a JAXP-compliant XML parser installed and available on your classpath.

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 from your preferred parser into Ant's lib directory or put the jars on the system classpath.

For the current version of Ant, you will also need a JDK installed on your system, version 1.1 or later. Some tasks work better on post-1.1 systems; some tasks only work on Java 1.2 and successors. A future version of Ant -Ant 2.0- will require JDK 1.2 or later, though Ant 1.x strives to retain 1.1 compatibility.

Note: The Microsoft JVM/JDK is not adequate on its own, although the MS compiler is supported.

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


next up previous contents index
Next: Installing Ant Up: Getting, Installing and Building Previous: Source Edition   Contents   Index
Andrew Marlow 2003-07-08