It's hardly the first award Ant has won[1] and it hopefully won't be the last. When I saw Developer.com announcing the winners of this year's Reader's Choice Award and Ant winning the category "Development Utility of the Year" I wondered why this year?.
When Ant 1.6 was released in late 2003 it brought a ton of new features that changed the way you work with Ant and and I think it really deserved special attention, but over the past two years it has only seen a few maintenance releases.
I waited for the details and now (nice title, BTW) I know who the runner ups have been (two editors, VMWare and a profiler) but I'm not really further. My best guess is that Ant 1.6.x started to ship with the major IDEs in 2005, a year ago most of them have been at the 1.5.x level. We know that downloads from Apache reach only a smallish fraction of Ant's user base and most users simply stick to the version shipping with their IDE.
Anyway. A big thanks to all the people who've improved Ant with bug reports, feature requests, feedback, tests, documentation and code over the past six years.
[1] As far as I know the first one has been the JavaWorld Editor's Choice Award in 2002.
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