Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and reporting) project dependencies. It is characterized by the following:

1. flexibility and configurability - Ivy is essentially process agnostic and is not tied to any methodology or structure. Instead it provides the necessary flexibility and configurability to be adapted to a broad range of dependency management and build processes.

2. tight integration with Apache Ant - while available as a standalone tool, Ivy works particularly well with Apache Ant providing a number of powerful Ant tasks ranging from dependency resolution to dependency reporting and publication.