Formic is an installation framework built on top of apache's ant. The idea is to leverage the vast amount of functionality that ant provides (directly and indirectly through third party add-ons) to create a framework based on a paradigm that the entire ant user base is familiar and comfortable with.

Formic consists of a set of ant tasks for packaging and running graphical and console based installers. The entire process of creating an installer with formic can be summed up in the following three steps.

• Create a series of panels (or utilize the formic supplied panels) for the installation wizard.
• Create an ant script to be executed by the installer for install and un-install of your application, which describes the flow of the installation wizard plus the series of ant tasks necessary to (un)install your application on the host system.
• Package your application files, installation build file, and a stripped down version of ant into platform specific executables.

Formic is released under the terms of the LGPL.