What is the default build process used by IntelliJ for Java projects?

Question

Building Java projects straight from the IDE in IntelliJ has been nice. It's fast and it just works. I wasn't able to find any documentation on how IntelliJ does these default builds. I'm guessing it uses Ant? What I want to do is automate this fast and painless build process for anyone who downloads my project. Is that possible?

I've usually used Maven, but it's very slow and error prone. I actually wasn't even able to convert this to a Maven project, because Maven refuses to find JUnit despite setting up the dependency according to examples in the official docs. I also tried to generate Ant build files from the IDE, but those do not work out of the box and after googling a bit, seems like that is not a good approach?

Answer 1

IntelliJ IDEA has its own build system, called JPS. It has limited support for automatic download of dependencies and it's really hard to invoke from the command line, so it's unlikely to be the best option for everyone who downloads your project, unless you want to force them to use IntelliJ IDEA.