The primary reason for ANT's existence is to provide a cross-platform
build tool for Java.  Since Java itself is cross-platform, it seems
natural that the build tool itself should be written in Java.

Make is good at handling dependencies, ANT is not as good and that was
not really a goal for ANT.  Use JavaMake for that.

Next, ANT always had XML parsing; how do you think that the build
"scripts" are interpreted?

If you think of ANT tasks as the simple units, ANT is not that far off.
 Of course, ANT tasks are not as re-usable as executables so ANT is far
from perfect or equivalent.

ANT provides an interface for third parties to create tools and
extensions.  This should be counted as a positive, not a negative.

I think that by "unusable in general" you mean unusable outside of ANT?

Sounds like the beginnings of a sourceforge project, or perhaps you
should donate it JUnit.

(Disclaimer: I understand that you do not like ANT and this is not an
attempt to convert you.)

Ray

Was it ?

Ant is there to do things that need doing as part of a build process.
Make is 30 (?) years old now - the _requirements_ for this have shifted.
Make didn't suddenly get hard overnight - the people who wrote Ant had
been using it for years already.

Compilation is now quick and easy. We just don't care so much about the
dependency tracking and never re-compiling something you didn't
absolutely have to that was important to make. I used to eat lunch while
I had a make running - I read the whole of Gormenghast waiting for
compilers to finish. Now I barely have time to swallow my cofee, let
alone make some more.

We expect more from our builds these days. Packaging and deployment are
pretty necessary. Unit testing too (if you're doing things right).
Working cross platform is the biggest issue of the lot (for deployment
anyway) something that make was never much help for. So Ant addresses
_these_ problems now, not the ones of yesteryear.  Ant doesn't concern
itself with dependencies - if you want to check them, it's either pushed
out into a task automatically (and it all still works how you'd want it
too), or else you have to code them up yourself in build.xml.

I can't make breakfast these days without it involving an XML parser.
You're going to have to find a stronger argument than that - should I
complain that Ant depends on directory hierarchies too, or on having a
JVM available?

So yes, Ant and <junitreport> are the way to go.  

Except when the answer is XDoclet instead, because there's a stack of
good stuff you can do by runnng that from within Ant too.