RE: Using the debugger with Aventail?

Can you include symbolic links in an EAR or WAR file?  If you can, life just
got really, really easy and some of my complaints about the whole EAR/WAR
concept go away (some, not all).

If not, the next question is "How do I do that?".  I want to be able to
create a set of symbolic links after I install my web application.  My guess
is that Ant can probably do it, but I have two issues:

1. I'm not very familiar with Ant, and I don't even know how an EAR or WAR
file specifies an Ant procedure to run.  My hope is that there is some way
to specify a "post-installation script", sort of like you can do with the
OS/400 product packaging APIs.

2. I don't know that Ant is the right answer.  From my research, I'm finding
there are people who really like Ant and people who really hate it, and to
the eyes of this non-expert, both sides have some pretty compelling
arguments.  Are there other types of scripts that can be run when an EAR or
WAR file is installed?  And how standard are these methods from one web
server to another?

Finally, is there a decent step-by-step tutorial that has an example of this
entire process?  I see how Ant can be used for a build process, but I don't
quite see it as a deployment tool.  Am I confused here?

Joe