Apache Ant vs phing: What are the differences?

What is Apache Ant? Java based build tool. Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.

What is phing? A PHP project build system or build tool based on ​Apache Ant. It is not GNU make; it's a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP 'task' classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework.

Apache Ant belongs to "Java Build Tools" category of the tech stack, while phing can be primarily classified under "Package Managers".

Some of the features offered by Apache Ant are:

• The most complete Java build and deployment tool available.
• Platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators
• Can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command

On the other hand, phing provides the following key features:

• Simple XML buildfiles
• Rich set of provided tasks
• Easily extendable via PHP classes

Apache Ant and phing are both open source tools. It seems that phing with 995 GitHub stars and 299 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Apache Ant with 252 GitHub stars and 254 GitHub forks.