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    <title>Ant2 feature list</title>
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    <h1>Ant2 Goals</h1>

    <p>Even though Ant2 is expected to be incompatible with the
    current Ant1 series, it still has the same goals. Ant is a Java
    based build tool and this remains the main focus of it. The
    original goals of simplicity, understandability and extensibility
    still stand and Ant2 will try to achieve them even better than
    Ant1 does.</p>

    <h2>Simplicity and Understandability</h2>

    <p>These two goals are closely related. Ant build files shall be
    easy to read and understand - at the same time it should be easy
    to write a custom Ant task and to use the utility classes that
    Ant2 provides.</p>

    <p>Ant2 shall be more consistent than Ant1 is - this means:</p>

    <ul>

      <li>core tasks will use the same attribute names for common
      functionality</li>

      <li>similar tasks will be unified to use similar forms.</li>

      <li>different implementations for the same functionality will be
      hidden behind facade tasks.</li>

      <li>properties and data types will be unified so that they share
      the same namespace and inheritance rules.</li>

    </ul>

    <p>Furthermore some things will have to become more explicit:</p>

    <ul>

      <li>remove all magic properties</li>

      <li>make build file writers explicitly state which
      filters/filtersets a copy task will use</li>

      <li>add scoping rules for properties so that not all of them
      will be inherited by sub-builds, only those that have been
      specified explicitly.</li>

    </ul>

    <h2>Extensibility</h2>

    <p>Ant2 like Ant1 uses build files written in XML as its main
    input, but it will not be restricted to it. The core of Ant2 will
    work on an object model of Project/Target/Task that is independent
    of any external representation.</p> 

    <p>As an extension of the current <code>&lt;taskdef&gt;</code>
    concept, tasks can be bundled into task libraries (together with
    data types and other utility classes). These task libraries are
    special JAR archives that somehow describe the contained tasks to
    Ant. Ant will automatically know all tasks contained in task
    libraries that have been placed into a special directory - in
    addition task libraries can be referenced and used in a build file
    explicitly.</p>

    <h1>New/Modified Features</h1>

    <p>Ant2 is going to break Ant1 in several ways:</p>

    <ul>

      <li>Tasks written for Ant1 won't work in Ant2 as the API of
      Ant's core and the names of utility classes are going to
      change. There will probably be adaptors and utility classes to
      ease the transition for task writers.</li>

      <li>Build files written for Ant1 will probably not be valid in
      Ant2 or at least not yield the same results. It is expected that
      Ant2 will come with a tool to translate Ant1 build files into
      equivalent Ant2 versions</li>

      <li>magic properties like <code>build.compiler</code> may
      disappear and be replaced by a different customization
      concept.</li>

      <li>Ant2 is going to require a JDK version 1.2 or above and a
      JAXP compliant parser version 1.1 or above.</li>

    </ul>

    <h1>Rejected Features</h1>

    <hr>
      <p align="center">$Id$</p>
      <p align="center">Copyright &copy; 2001 Apache Software
        Foundation. All rights Reserved.</p>
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