New to Java

Hi,
I've been using maven for a while, it's really a deep impression that maven provides so much convenience. Now i m having a project has to be built by Ant. I m wondering whether Ant can do the same thing as maven does. The function i m after is the external library referencing in maven. I m not very familiar with Ant, it looks all external libraries(JARs) must be put in the 'lib' directory, this is ok for compiling, but while i m developing the project in Eclipse, it can't reference to those libraries unless i manually add them through Eclipse project property settings, this is what i don't want to do, because it seems redundant.

Is there a way that i can setup the environment for Eclipse project using Ant?

Your help is sincerely appreciated!

best regards