Just after I sent out the prior FYI regarding Ant & the Netbeans IDEI discovered that they have already implemented 'better templates' for the upcoming version. See below.
NetBeans is, I believe Open Source. Perhaps their changes/additions could be folded into the 'standard' Ant distro, particularly if they've enhanced help for the new user. David 1.2.2. Better Templates There should be better build script templates; currently only one template is provided, a hello-world script with an init target and a dummy target running <echo>. More sophisticated templates should be provided showing how to set up Java source compilation with class directories, create JARs, run Javadoc, and so on - tasks typically needed for users creating a small Java-based application. In addition, there could be templates for custom Ant tasks, demonstrating the basic methods needed to enable interesting data to be passed to the task, and showing where to do the work. Bugzilla: #8215 Implemented
