Apache Ivy is the de facto dependency manager for Apache Ant. Apache Ivy is meant to be flexible (can even be used without Ant) and compatible with Maven and other type of file and network based repositories. Ivy is managed with Xml files, just like Ant, content management technologies like Xslt, Xproc and lots of data sets and content documents.

Ivy is not restricted to jar or package files, it can handle arbitrary types of artifacts, trace elaborated configuration chains and using multiple repositories.