A while back I ranting to a coworker about limitations of make and ant. My main complaint about ant was the choice of XML to represent the build script. I felt a reasonable scripting language would give a lot more power.

That discussion eventually led to the creation of Rake. But it seems others seem to have similar thoughts.

James Duncan Davidson, the original ant developer, writes …

When I first chose XML as the configuration format for Ant, I figured it was a great way to replace the simple properties files that I was using before with a structure that could define hierarchical data. However, as time goes on the XML format becomes more and more burdensome to actually getting something done. […] For a long time, I’ve thought that the way to alleviate the burden for Ant would be to use some sort of scripting language to front end the Ant task object model under the covers.

Jonathon Simon is also talking about scripting ant, but using Jython access the ant object module. In an email to the ant-dev mailing list, he lays out some of his ideas. (He even mentions using JRuby.)

It will be interesting to watch where this goes. I suspect that the XML ant build script may have its days numbered.