I was the first person to use Ant outside of Sun. I committed it to the Apache cvs repo after James donated it. The initial use for it was to build the source

I was the first person to use Ant outside of Sun. I committed it to the Apache cvs repo after James donated it. The initial use for it was to build the source code for what became Tomcat (also donated by Sun/James). At the time, Java didn't really have a build system. We were using Makefiles for Apache JServ, and it was horrid. Ant was a breath of fresh air. At the time, XML was the hot "new" thing. We were instantly in love with it and trying to get it to do more. Nobody could have predicted what Ant was going to turn into. It was effectively an experiment and just a step forward from what we had previously. Iterative software development at its finest. Similar to how Subversion was a better CVS. At the time Subversion was being developed (I was part of that as well), nobody could predict that a whole different model (git) would be so much better. We were all used to a centralized version control system. It is entertaining watching everyone bork on about this topic, 24 years later. By the way, Java still doesn't have a good build system. Maven and Gradle, lol.