Is it possible to have ANT restart your java application on a remote server from a build script? If so any pointers to where that might be defined?
I'm using ant now to push the new code over to the remote server but I still have to login to actually restart the app
Using the <sshexec> task you can do pretty much anything on a remote machine (assuming it's got an sshd running). If you don't want to worry about authenticating the ssh session every time, you can set up RSA keys.
<sshexec host="remotehost" username="remoteuser" command="/restart/application/command"/>
Heed the statement at the beginning of the above link:
This task depends on external libraries
You'll need to grab JCraft's JSch jar and put it on Ant's classpath.