Keep the Ant, Hold the XML

Saw a great article on running Apache Ant without putting the entire build file in XML. Why would you want to do this? Read this. It talks about how to “employ Ant programmatically in Java code without the constraints of XML for easier customization.” If you like this model of writing Ant tasks without XML, but don’t like the verbosity of Java for doing so, take a look at the Groovy scripting language which allows Ant build files to be written in Groovy.