Chapter 2 Introduction

2.1 What Phing Is

Phing is a project build system based on Apache ant (See ant ). You can do anything with Phing that you could do with a traditional build system like Gnu make (See gnumake ), and Phing's use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP task classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework.

Because Phing is based on Ant, parts of this manual are also adapted from the ant manual (see ant ). We are extremely grateful to the folks in the Ant project for creating (and continuing to create) such an inspiring build system model, and for the open-source licensing that makes it possible for us to learn from each other and build increasingly better tools.