Today I was considering whether to include Ant in a Java webapp, not because I wanted to run builds inside my web server, but because I wanted Ant's portable tasks like copy and replace. The Ant welcome page says this about itself:
Make-like tools are inherently shell-based -- they evaluate a set of dependencies, then execute commands not unlike what you would issue in a shell...Ant is different. Instead of a model where it is extended with shell-based commands, Ant is extended using Java classes.
Actually, it seems to me Ant hasn't gotten us away from the shell, it's provided us a new shell with portable commands. Granted there are more commands one could want but I'm pretty happy with what we've got.
Come to think of it, generating Java source and compiling it inside a webapp might be kind of interesting...
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