Java News from Monday, October 16, 2006

The Apache Project has posted the third 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.

Beta 3 mostly fixes bugs.


The Apache Ant Project has also posted the first beta of AntUnit 1.0, an Ant library that "contains tasks to test Ant tasks using Ant instead of JUnit."


JPOX 1.1.3, an open source implementation of Java Data Objects (JDO) 2.0, has been released. that provides transparent persistence to Java objects. It supports most major SQL databases and can be queried using either JDOQL or SQL. 1.1.3 simplifies user-defined type mappings and supports same-named subclass fields in the superclass table. It's published under the Apache 2.0 License.