Ant is a build system that was developed for the Jakarta Tomcat project and 
was used internally at Sun. It was originally developed by James Davidson 
<duncan@eng.sun.com> and has been extended by others including myself. When 
Jakarta was released as Open Source, the developer community also obtained 
the source to Ant as well. This is a great addition to the community.

You can obtain the Ant source code from <http://jakarta.apache.org/>. It is 
currently located in the jakarta-tools CVS repository.

The build-ecs.xml file is the "code" that tells Ant what to do. The beauty 
of Ant is that it is entirely XML based so creating installation scripts is 
as easy as creating a XML file. You should not need to edit the 
build-ecs.xml file unless you wish to change paths of things.

The build-ecs.sh and build-ecs.bat scripts are wrappers that invoke Ant and 
pass in some arguments, including the path to the XML file, for building 
ECS. The .sh script is for Unix systems and the .bat script is for Win32 
systems. You should edit the appropriate script for your platform and 
specify any necessary items to add to your classpath. This is well 
documented in the scripts source.

-jon stevens
jons@apache.org