# Chapter 2 Introduction 2.1 What Phing Is Phing is a project build system based on Apache ant (See [ant](bi01.html#ant "[ant]")). You can do anything with Phing that you could do with a traditional build system like Gnu make (See [gnumake](bi01.html#gnumake "[gmake]")), 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](bi01.html#ant "[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.