Ant is a build tool. Say for example you have several projects in your Eclipse workspace, all of which are pieces of a larger application. To build it all into a jar file with dependencies included, you could select all the projects and export them as a jar file, but that's somewhat cumbersome.
Ant is an extensible solution. You define the build process in XML, and ant compiles your java files according to this recipe.
Ant can do more than building, too. I worked at a company where the mechanism for deployment was Debian packages in our own repository. We had Ant scripts that would build the jar files, arrange them and some metadata files into a Debian package, put them into the repository, and re-generate the repository manifest.
As with anything Java, there's a lot of configuration you need to get your head around before you're proficient with Ant, but some of the basic tutorials should give you an idea of what you're getting yourself into.
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