O’Reilly has an article on installing software with Ant (found at paradox1x). All I have to say is that if you’re developing web apps in Java aren’t using Ant not only to compile your classes, but also bundle your apps into WAR files and deploy them on your Web server, you’re missing the boat. I have Tomcat set up to automatically refresh WAR files when they change, so when I update some code, I just type ant redeploy and start testing. Ant is the best tool ever.