You can do any software task a million different ways, but using the right tool can speed up development and maintenance time. Ant is developed specifically for automated builds, deployment and unit testing. Also to get everything you can out of Ant you really do need to use the external tools that were developed for Ant especially ant-contrib ( http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/) There are some good articles discussing Ant (a bunch of articles can be found here : http://ant.apache.org/resources.html ) Keep the Ant, Hold the XML http://www.ftponline.com/javapro/2004_06/magazine/features/kgauthier/ (this might help out your colleague if he really doesn't want to script in XML, then do it in Java and have it use the ANT API) Ant in Anger: http://ant.apache.org/ant_in_anger.html New Ant 1.6 Features for Big Projects http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/bodewig_ant1.6.html There are also some good books on using Ant effectively once you're convinced them it's the correct tool (although they are out of date with Ant 1.6, which provides a whole slew of new great features such as <import> and <macrodef> that can allow you to create inheritance hierarchies of builds, so you can reuse them and extend them, or at least that's how I've been using it): http://www.manning.com/hatcher/
Doug Daniels
