The Apache Ant community deeply regrets the passing of Bruce Atherton, one of its long-time contributors, after a long fight against leukemia.

Bruce joined the Ant developer list in late 2001 and became a commiter in 2002. He was the inventor of Ant's selector framework and an early contributor to design ideas for Ant's resource abstraction and the Antlib extension mechanism. Many Java developers use his code and ideas.

He always pressed for clean designs in a calm and gentle way. During the past few years he was limited by his illness, but remained an important voice in discussions when he had the strength to chime in.

Ant would not have been the same without Bruce; we miss him.