I'm not sure if this was already out there somewhere. But I sure didn't find it. Anyways, my very slow (0.3GHZ) machine was coughing all the way whilst I'm trying to write some Java program at home, compiling them with Ant. Frustrated with the start-up delays, I wrote this very simple task to allow invoking of ant targets at will - without the slow startup that Ant has, everytime its called - CommandLineTask.java
To use, just add a new task definition into an existing build.xml:

<taskdef name="command" classname="org.yanime.ant.CommandLineTask" />

And add a new target, say "cmd":

<target name="cmd">
<command />
</target>

Easy. Now, run your build, invoking the "cmd" target and you'll get a prompt. Type in any targetname to continue / repeat your process. The command line will remain until you type !. With so much speed up (22secs compile now takes 3 seconds!) for so little work (96 lines), I really wonder why I'd never written this helper earlier. Sigh.

The only caveat is, don't use it if any classes used by Ant is being changed and needs a refresh (e.g. whilst developing CommandLineTask which is part of the taskdef in the build.xml) - but that's pretty rare.

Update: Ok, looks like a decent sized compile eats over 100MB of RAM and that remains used, no matter how many times you recompile. So a best-of-both-world solution will be to exit ANT after every input commandline, but restart ANT to the command task's prompt immediately so that the next compile / commandline can start immediately without waiting for ANT's slow startup - parsing build.xml. At least that seems to improve my edit-compile-test cycle using Ant.