Wed, 01. Oct 2003
Yesterday Antoine has released the first beta of Apache Ant 1.6.
What can you expect apart from a ton of fixed and another ton of new bugs?
My personal (incomplete, I'm sure) list of important new features in no particular order:
- You can now add custom conditions to <condition> or filterreaders or selectors by using <typedef> and either implementing a particular interface or using one of the supplied adapter classes. See the beta manual to get an initial idea.
- XML namespace support. That on itself isn't too exciting, but together with ...
- Antlib ... things get more interesting. At first glance <antlib> is nothing more than a unified <taskdef> and <typedef> - but you can bind it to a particular namespace and suddenly get scoping of names and more readable build files.
- Presetdef - you don't like the default value of "off" for <javac>'s debug attribute? Just define a javac2 task with the attribute set to true. Presetdef is your way to define default configurations of existing tasks.
- Macrodef - hopefully this is going to remove a bunch of <antcall> "abuses" present in Ant 1.5 build files. Create a new task from a set of tasks as a macro.
- Import - import another build file and even override targets of that other build file using a replacement of your own.
- All tasks are equal - they may now all live outside of <target>.
- SSH support via <sshexec> and <scp>.
- Scriptdef - define new tasks using your favorite scripting language.
- subant - invoke the same target in a whole bunch of build files.
path: /en/Apache/Ant | #