Elapsed Time in ksh

Being a novice on shell programming (ksh & bash), I've been looking for something short and sweet that would tell me how much time was taken up for my build (ant) to complete. Printing out the time(s) at the beginning of the script and at the end is very simple.. but what I'd wanted to was to print out something like.. " application build took and was completed successfully at ". I tried googling (of course) and found various scripts involving grep/awk and some perl scripts.. Damn.. quite a lot to do for a simple stuff.. But then my stars aligned properly and I hit upon a forum which gave me EXACTLY what I was looking (something short and sweet)! Just a simple $SECONDS did it! Here's how it was used:

START_TIME=$SECONDS
.. do what you need here..
END_TIME=$SECONDS
ELAPSED_TIME=$(($END_TIME-$START_TIME))

echo "A took $ELAPSED_TIME seconds to complete.."