3.3. Calling Other Ant Tasks

You've seen that you can branch using true/false properties. Ant provides other powerful mechanisms for branchingthe antcall task, which you can use to call one Ant task from another, and the ant task, which calls Ant tasks in other build files.

3.3.1. Calling Ant Tasks in the Same Build File

A better way to think of antcall is that you're starting a new instance of Ant and executing targets in it. When you call an Ant target with antcall, its dependent targets are executed in order, something that can be confusing if you think you're calling a single target. Generally, it's best to do things the standard way and let Ant sort out the dependencies as it's supposed to. However, Ant can make life easier, as when you have a build file that creates a distribution for many different servers, and when varying sets of tasks need to be executed for each. (Even in cases like that, however, you can still set things up easily enough with if and unless and true/false properties.)