Java News from Monday, August 28, 2006

The Apache Project has posted the first beta of version 1.7 of Ant, the popular XML based, open source build tool for Java.

Ant 1.7 introduces a resource framework. Some of the core ant tasks such as <copy/> are now able to process not only file system resources but also zip entries, tar entries, paths, ... Resource collections group resources, and can be further combined with operators such as union and intersection. This can be extended by custom resources and custom tasks using resources.

Ant 1.7 starts outsourcing of optional tasks to Antlibs. The .NET antlib in preparation will replace the .NET optional tasks which ship in Ant. Support for the version control system Subversion will be only provided as an antlib to be released shortly.

Ant 1.7 fixes also a large number of bugs.

Ant 1.7 has no support for Java6 features, but first tests on Java6 did not fail.