I see reference of ant a lot but I don't get exactly what its meant to do? from what i've heard its supposed to compile your projects but can't i just do that by clicking Run->Run in eclipse?

Edit : I guess I should rephrase my question. I already know that ant is a 'build automation software', my question is, what exactly is build automation? I thought that you're supposed to test your app, and when it is running you click the 'build' button in eclipse or through command-line java, and it makes a .jar file out of it? So why do you need to 'automate' this process?

java ant build-process
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