This plugin provides the ability to run Ant tasks from within Maven 2. You can even embed your Ant scripts in the POM!
It is not the intention of this plugin to provide a means of polluting the POM, so it's encouraged to move all your Ant tasks to a build.xml file and just call it from the POM using Ant's <ant/> task.
One of the main purposes of this plugin is to facilitate the migration from Ant based projects to Maven 2. Some projects may not currently be able to migrate because they depend on custom build functionality that Maven 2 doesn't provide by default.
Instructions on how to use the Maven AntRun Plugin can be found here.
To provide you with better understanding on some usages of the Maven AntRun Plugin, you can take a look into the following examples: