Ant: An Introduction - Java Application Development on Linux - page 223

9.4.2.1
Every buildfile must begin with a project tag. A buildfile must contain exactly
one project tag.
The project tag contains three attributes:

The project Tag

name
The name of the project.

default
The default target (see next section).

basedir
The base directory of the project. Usually this is “.” meaning the directory
the buildfile is in.

The project name is just a name. It is not of particular importance to ant ,
although many IDEs that integrate ant will make use of the name attribute of
the project.
The default attribute names a target tag that will be built by default
if a build target is not passed to ant (see Section 9.4.2.2).

9.4.2.2
Every time you run ant , you are building a target . If you do not specify a target,
ant will run the target named in the default attribute of the project tag.
A project may contain any number of targets. The target tag has five
attributes:

The target Tag

depends
The name or names of other targets that must be built before this target
may be built.

description
A descriptive name for the target. Displayed when ant -projecthelp
is run.

if

Specifies a property name (see Section 4.4). The target is only built if the
named property is set.