I need to define some variables.

I put the following at the end of /etc/profile:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_04
export ANT_HOME=/apache-ant-1.6.5
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin
export PATH=${PATH}:${JAVA_HOME}/bin

Is there a better way to do this or is this the standard accepted way?

Thanks!

No. That works, but it will be done globally, which you may or may not want.
If you want it local only (current user) - then append it to ~/.bash_profile (if you use bash, of course.)

The correct, or accepted way to do this, is to first declare the variable, and then export it to make it available to the system.

JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_04
ANT_HOME=/apache-ant-1.6.5
PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin
PATH=${PATH}:${JAVA_HOME}/bin

export $JAVA_HOME
export $ANT_HOME
export $PATH

The way you do it works, but this is cleaner - because technically, you shouldn't declare and export all in the same go. It should be a two step process.

I think it depends on your distribution and other factors, such as if several people use the machine and may use a shell other then Bash or the Csh. /etc/profile is generally where the system wide login script would be located. I believe that it would run when a person logs in who uses either the bash or csh as their default login shell. I don't know about the korn shell or tsh.
Even if a particular shell doesn't use /etc/profile, I'm betting that whatever login script file it uses, will source the /etc/profile file if it exists.
One example, for SuSE, you would make the changes to /etc/profile.local and not to /etc/profile itself. Your best bet may be to to become familiar with your system and distro, and make the changes where they are expected. Things usually work out the best when you work with the system.

One alternative may be to move the settings to the linuxrc script (might be a linuxrc.local on your system). This will make the setting a part of the boot process however this may be unnecessary overkill for you particular example.

I modified profile to declare and export my variables in 2 steps. Works fine.

This server will be mostly used for remote application (CVS, DB2, Tomcat, etc..) so giving those variables to everybody is ok.