Although Ant might be considered an old technology by modern standards it can still be employed to good effect. The creation of a standard set of macros has allowed the content delivery team to drastically improve their efficiency, the quality of their code and their interaction with other teams involved in content production by allowing them to concentrate on actual content issues rather than the minutiae of how they build things. It has also positioned the team to be more in line with current CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) models that the company is starting to adopt. It is, however, important to note that teams must have a clear idea of how they want to work—in the form of the Development Policy, for example, or a similar document—before factoring this into build files and configurations themselves.

A number of the lessons learned through the development of the team’s Ant library are now available in the XPantS library. It is hoped that this will prove useful to the general community.