You can write a Mojo in Java, or you can write a Mojo in an alternative language. Maven has support for a number of implementation languages, and this chapter is going show you how to create plugins in three languages: Groovy, Ant, and Ruby plugins.
Ant isn't a language as much as it is a build tool which allows you
to describe a build as a set of tasks grouped into build targets. Ant then
allows you to declare dependencies between build targets; for example, in
Ant you are essentially creating your own lifecycle. An Ant
build.xml might have an install target which depends
on a test target which depends on a compile target. Ant is something of a
ancestor to Maven, it was the ubiquitous procedural build tool that almost
every project used before Maven introduced the concept of wide-scale
reusability of common build plugins and the concept of a universal
lifecycle.
While Maven is an improvement on Ant, Ant can still be useful when describing parts of the build process. Ant provides a set of tasks which can come in handy when you need to perform file operations or XSLT transformations or any other operation you could think of. There is a large library of available Ant tasks for everything from running JUnit tests to transforming XML to copying files to a remote server using SCP. An overview of available Ant tasks can be found online in the Apache Ant Manual. You can use these tasks as a low-level build customization language, and you can also write a Maven plugin where, instead of a Mojo written in Java, you can pass parameters to a Mojo which is an Ant build target.
