The creation of abuild would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of my employer, Argon ST. Argon not only recognized the important role of a strong build tool in contributing to the overall quality and reliability of its software, but saw the value of releasing it to the open source community in hopes of making an even broader contribution.
There are many people within Argon who helped take abuild to where it is now, but among these, a handful of people deserve special mention:
Brian Reid, who first introduced me to Groovy, the language that is at the heart of abuild version 1.1's significantly improved Java support, and who kept the momentum going for making abuild's Groovy-based Java framework a reality
Brian Reid, Joe Schettino, Kathleen Friesen, and Brandon Barlow who met with me many times to help hammer out and test early versions of the Groovy-based Java framework
Brandon Barlow for tirelessly testing numerous builds with abuild 1.1 during its alpha period.
Cass Dalton, who has frequently served as a sounding board as I think about new abuild capabilities, and who has played a significant role in helping to ensure that abuild is as stable and widely usable as possible
Chris Costa, who served as a sounding board and contributed numerous ideas throughout the entire development process of abuild, including conducting a thorough review of the abuild 1.0 documentation
Andrew Hayden, who spent many hours reviewing and critiquing the entire manual prior to the release of version 1.0 and who contributed many feature ideas designed to ease implementation of an abuild Eclipse plugin
Joe Davidson, the first abuild evangelist who has been invaluable in getting abuild to become as widely accepted within Argon ST as it is
Gavin Mulligan, who has consistently taken the time to report any problem, no matter how small, and who probably reported more issues than everyone else combined during abuild's pre-1.0 alpha period
Bob Tamaru, who in addition to being a mentor and supporter for most of my career, provided considerable assistance to me as I presented the case to Argon ST to allow me to release abuild as an open source project