Where can I find a tutorial on writing tasks to be used with the
Jakarta project's Ant utility?

Hi gerbil:

Thank you for the interesting question. 

The best source of tutorial information on the Jakarta Project's Ant
utilitiy is the Jakarta Project website itself at:

http://jakarta.apache.org/index.html

Using their excellent (Google powered) search facility, I was able to
find the following tutorials for you.

Apache Ant Task Design Guidelines
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/ant_task_guidelines.html

Developing Custom Ant tasks with VisualAge for Java on Linux 
http://www7.software.ibm.com/vad.nsf/data/document2366?OpenDocument&p=1&BCT=1&Footer=1

Resources Page (for other support material)
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/resources.html


Other material I found on the Web includes:

10 Minutes Guide to Ant
http://www.roseindia.net/jboss/10_minutes_guide_to_ant.shtml

A beginners guide to Ant
http://www.iseran.com/Java/ant/tutorial/ant_tutorial.html

Tutorial: Building with Ant files
http://info.borland.com/techpubs/jbuilder/jbuilder7/bajb/ant/ant_tutorial.html


I also found a book that you might want to consider buying:

Java Development with Ant
http://javaboutique.internet.com/resources/books/Ant/


I hope that this material is sufficient to get you start writing Ant
tasks. Please ask if you need clarification of anything I've written.

Thanks. 

websearcher-ga


Search Strategy:

tutorial writing tasks ant site:jakarta.apache.org
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=tutorial+writing+tasks+ant+site%3Ajakarta.apache.org

tutorial writing ant jakarta task OR tasks
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=tutorial+writing+ant+jakarta+task+OR+tasks

tutorial ant task OR tasks
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=tutorial+ant+task+OR+tasks

The answer gives a lot of unrequested information (e.g. Ant
tutorials).  The one
page that addressed my question (Developing Custom Ant tasks with
VisualAge...) was pretty poor, but I guess that's not the researcher's
fault.

I had to learn Ant for a Java/EJB/servlet project I worked on
recently. I found it to be an elegant piece of software, although it
did seem rather underspecified in its behavior, in my opinion.

In any case, the best resource I found on Ant is the book 

"Java Development With Ant", by Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran,
Manning 2002. The URL is: http://www.manning.com/hatcher/ .

The good news is that chapter 19, pages 467-497, contains detailed
information on writing ant tasks, and has examples (although I don't
think I would necessarily call it a "tutorial").

The bad news is that the publisher is out of the hardcopy edition, and
you will have to order it as an ebook. I had to order mine as an
ebook, and it's definitely a hassle: it's 600 pages long (too long for
me to read online) so I had to pay Kinko's, whose website was a little
bit confused, to print and bind the thing.

In your case, though, since you are only interested in chapter 19, it
might be worthwhile; the ebook is only $22.00
http://www.manning.com/ebook_buy.html?project=hatcher .

Another ant resource is the ant forum at:
http://www.jguru.com/forums/home.jsp?topic=Ant .