What is the difference between platform and tool?

The question is telling everything

Reason why I ask:

Maven is more of a platform than a tool, while you could consider 开发者_如何学运维Maven an alternative to Ant, you are comparing apples to oranges. "Maven" includes more than just a build tool.

What the heck does this mean?

Different tools make apps for the same platform ... The quotation you brought up just claim that Maven does more than Ant so that it's not fair to compare the two.

You build "things" on top of a platform. You build those "things" with tools.

To use an analogy, think of a city as a platform. The city (platform) provides basic services such as:

• Power
• Communications channels
• Sewage lines
• Streets
• Land/lots to build on
• Etc.

You can build all kinds of "things" within a city - e.g. retail stores, office buildings, homes, movie theaters, etc. These "things" are all built using a wide variety of tools - e.g. hammers, saws, power drills, cranes, etc.

What all of these "things" have in common is that many/most of them make use of the various services provided by the city (platform). This allows you to build those "things" much more quickly and efficiently since you don't have to re-invent these services for each and every "thing" that you build.

It's also possible, due to economies of scale, that the services will be cheaper when they're provided as part of a platform vs. creating them for each use case. For example, you wouldn't want to create an electrical power plant for each home that you build.

In some cases, the "things" that get built can become part of the overall platform. For example, building a new electrical substation at the edge of a city can allow for new things to be built with easier, more efficient access to electricity increasing the overall capabilities of the platform.