Stefan Bodewig's Weblog

ROCA - Resource-Oriented Client Architecture

Some of my colleagues at innoQ have put together a bunch of rules about what makes up a web application that actually uses the web rather than hides it.

There is more on Stefan Tilkov's blog and the ROCA website. Discussion (there, not here) is more than welcome.

Apache Ant 1.8.3 Released

yesterday we released Ant 1.8.3, go grab it from the download page. By pure coincidence it was released on a leap-day.

This release really mostly is a bug fix release, see the release notes for a complete list. There isnt anything major sticking out to me, but I know people have been bitten by some of the bugs - like forked Java processes hanging when they read from System.in - so for them the new release was important.

The dev team has decided to drop Java 1.4 support (as Ant's runtime) for trunk, so this may likely be the last release supporting Java 1.4. We have prepared a branch so we may be able to create more 1.8.x releases if a major bug raises its head. For trunk this means we'll be able to start using "modern" features like generics. It also means I can merge some improvements like Zip64 support from Commons Compress into Ant.

One of the fixes introduced a new class in order to better multiplex between System.out and System.err when forking a new process. This allows Ant 1.8.3 to be detected by either

  <antversion property="Ant-1.8.3-or-later"
              atleast="1.8.3"/>

  <available property="Ant-1.8.3-or-later"
             classname="org.apache.tools.ant.util.LineOrientedOutputStreamRedirector"/>

It's been the first time I acted as Ant's release manager since Ant 1.1 more than eleven years ago, quite a bit has changed WRT process but also automation since then. It wasn't as painful as I feared it to be, largely because we no longer ship optional tasks that require third party jars that cannot be downloaded freely.

Moved my Tiny OSS Libs to GitHub

I've been keeping a small Antlib for GWT and a DLL with NAnt and MSBuild tasks to run Ant in a local darcs repository. Now I've decided to not maintain them here anymore but rather move them to github, so they now are at https://github.com/bodewig/gwttasks and https://github.com/bodewig/Ant4NantAndMSBuild respectively.

For the migration of my - trivial - darcs repos I used https://github.com/purcell/darcs-to-git and it worked like a charm.

Apache Compress Antlib 1.1

A few days after Apache Commons Compress 1.3 has been released the Compress Antlib has seen a new release as well. This gives Ant support for Zip64 extensions, the Unix dump format (read-only) and the Pack200 format.

Prior to this release Pack200 support has already been available via a a task at java.net but the Compress Antlib also adds a pack200resource as well as a pack200normalize task that can be used to "normalize" a JAR so that it can be signed, packed and unpacked with the signature remaining valid.

Apache log4net User Survey

The last log4net release already stopped supporting Compact Framework 1.x and the Shared Source CLI as part of the binary distributions - but versions for them are still buildable from source. In order to figure out what platforms we will need to support in future releases the team is asking log4net's users to participate in a small survey.

Rather than repeating Roy's whole mail, here is the original announcement.