I'd like to share my experience of using Ant in building projects, *.properties files should be copied explicitly. This is because Ant will not compile *.properties files into the build working directory by default (javac just ignore *.properties). For example:
<target name="compile" depends="init">
<javac destdir="${dst}" srcdir="${src}" debug="on" encoding="utf-8" includeantruntime="false">
<include name="com/example/**" />
<classpath refid="libs" />
</javac>
<copy todir="${dst}">
<fileset dir="${src}" includes="**/*.properties" />
</copy>
</target>
<target name="jars" depends="compile">
<jar jarfile="${app_jar}" basedir="${dst}" includes="com/example/**/*.*" />
</target>
Please notice that 'copy' section under the 'compile' target, it will replicate *.properties files into the build working directory. Without the 'copy' section the jar file will not contain the properties files, then you may encounter the java.util.MissingResourceException.