Use Jython to Write Ant Tasks

http://www.pycs.net/users/0000177/stories/11.html
Use Jython to Write Ant Tasks

Abstract

This article looks at how to add scripted behaviour to ant builds. It details the steps to write a custom Ant task in jython, compile it and install it into ant so it can be used as any other task in an ant build. The article also takes a quick look at an alternate implementation using Groovy.

Fowler summarizes the issues like this:
... Simple builds are easy to express as a series of tasks and dependencies. For such builds the facilities of ant/make work well. But more complex builds require conditional logic, and that requires more general programming language constructs - and that's where ant/make fall down.