To understand the Ant Hill ecosystem is better to introduce first a short glossary.

Ecosystem Glossary

Ant task

An Ant task is an atomic operation perfomed by Ant.

There are several native tasks provided by Ant to satisfy its vocation of build system, from compilation to distribution, and many more.

You can code your own Ant task.

The list of available Ant native tasks is here.

See also Ant tasks.

Ant target

A target is a sequence of ant tasks meant to reach a goal.

Targets are defined by developers to help users in compiling, distributing and generating documentation of your application.

See also See also Ant targets.

Ant project

An ant project is an XML file defining a set of targets.

See also Ant projects.

XMPP

XMPP is an XML based protocol for instant messaging.

See also Jabber - XMPP.

XMPP Client

An XMPP client is intended in this specific context as any application able to send and receive messages over XMPP protocol.

The Big Picture

picture 1

Ecosystem in detail

Picture 1 shown a generic operational context for Ant Hill.

This ecosystem comprises listeners, commanders , notifiers , servers and XMPP clients.

Listener nodes are XMPP user BOTs exposing Ant targets.

Every listener is waiting for execute a target and report processing result.

A listener has a list of users that are authorized in invoking tasks.

A listener can be driven both by a XMPP client and a commander.

The chat console handler of a listener is disabled by default, it is also possible to specify a rule for user names authorized in executing commands.

A commander is a task able to open an XMPP connection toward a listener and invoke one or more targets.

A notifier is similar to a commander task , but it is meant to send human readable text messages through XMPP protocol to an XMPP client.

To set this scenario working we finally need an XMPP server, that provides connectivity among AntHill nodes ecosystem.

The Server node is implemented as an Ant task that can be run in any host.

The Server node grants user identity and data encryption is provided by XMPP profile (verify).

This communication scenario can be distributed over Internet.