I wonder if I'm the only person who thinks that the designers of
Apache Ant, the build tool for Java software, couldn't have made a less intuitive, more complex format for their build scripts if they'd tried. Seriously, XML may well make for nice, easily parsable configuration files, but from a user perspective, it's utterly unreadable.
So if you've been forced into a position where you have to use ant, you might find this brief
example from Javabeat handy...