Phil Molaro emailed me and asked me about Ant support in standalone Aptana. Turns out – there isn’t any. For some reason they did not bundle Ant? I dug around the Aptana forums and found one post which has a brief comment by “ingo” one of the Aptana staff …

I checked, and the ANT plugin relies on the JDT for at least the UI portion… I’m not 100% positive if we can strip out the pieces of the JDT (Java Development Tools) and keep all of the pieces that using ANT in this way requires.

I’ve added a Trac item for it for now, but I think there may be an alternate approach where we use the internal scripting engine of Aptana.

http://www.aptana.com/trac/ticket/4206#preview

For the moment, the best workaround is to use Aptana as a plugin to Eclipse

Unfortunately the ticket above is 404 and digging through their new bug tracker I couldn’t find anything related.

Outside of running Aptana inside Eclipse, I don’t know of any ‘stand alone’ Ant plugin for Eclipse as it’s installed by default? My one thought was you could install Eclipse and Aptana side by side and compare them using a diff tool and copy over anything Ant related but I have no idea if that would actually work :)