how do I to tell ANT not to wait for a task to finish?

[CAMPANA,SAL (HP-Philadelphia,ex1)]

Is there a way to make a task run and continue through the ant script
without waiting for the task to end?

For instance, I want to start an external application, then start another to
interact with that application.  

It seems that ANT only runs sequentially and waits for a task to finish
before moving to the next task.  This makes total sense for building my
classes, but I'd love to be able to spawn separate threads of execution
without waiting.

One way I did it was to call a batch file which started my app.  The batch
file will die after it executes the command and the ANT file moves on....

Any ideas? Am I missing something?

Thank you!