Java-based build tool: Ant

Apache Ant is a cross-platform, Java-based build tool, resembling make somewhat. Unlike make, which can be extended with shell-based commands, Ant is extended using Java classes, and instead of writing shell commands, Ant's configuration files are XML-based, calling out a target tree where various tasks get executed. But if you really need to, you can execute a shell command by using Ant's <exec> task, which allows different commands to be executed based on the host OS.