UltraEdit is not free - but you can download a free evaluation copy.
www.ultraedit.com I used the "Tool configuration" menu to set up execution of Ant as a menu item with capture of the output to a UltraEdit text window.
You should download the full Ant package from
http://jakarta.apache.org so you can get the complete documentation. Essentially, Ant processes a build.xml file that defines various jobs to execute. Compilation being one of the basic jobs. There are a lot of useful built in jobs and you can define more.
Bill