I'm developing a few custom ant tasks that all need to initialize the same objects. I wanted to initialize those object's in a common superclass that extends from Task, in the init() method. But I see from the lifecycle of an ant task that init() gets called before the tasks child elements and attributes are set. So all of the data I need for initializing those objects is unavailable during init(), if I am reading right.

So, why is init() called at this point? What do you even know that you could use in init()? What could it be used for?

(And is there some other method that I can rely on to be called before execute(), but after my data is available?)