Ant has been chosen by Software Development magazine as a finalist for this year's Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards. Winners will be announced at their "Software Development West" conference in San Jose on April 24th.
Ant has won the JavaWorld Editors' Choice Award for
Most Useful Java Community-Developed Technology.
Read the
full article -- or jump directly to the bit about
our award :)
Java 1.4 has now been released by Sun. The latest Ant source supports the new assert statement in the compiler task via the source attribute. It also contains a compatibility fix needed for some ant tasks on Java 1.4 over Windows XP. If you have problems running Ant 1.4.1 on WinXP/Java 1.4, please use a recent build or compile your own version from the source tree.
Please visit the download area.
A commented version of the collected user requirements is now available here - it is not complete as some details still have to be defined, but it should give you an idea of what Ant2 is going to look like.
Several details can only be decided in the light of real code and prototypes. Several people are working on prototypes (that can be found in Ant's CVS module in the proposals directory) and discussion is going on on the Ant-Dev mailing list.
Sun has released an introductory article on Ant on their Dot-Com Builder site on May 30 2001. See http://dcb.sun.com/practices/profiles/ant.jsp
Ant has been in use for quite some time and has been used in ways never conceived when it was originally written. While Ant 1.x has continued to sucessfully evolve and grow, there are a number of limitations and inconsistencies that are now apparent and which need to be addressed.
As we continue to evolve and enhance Ant 1.x, it is now time to define what Ant 2.0 will encompass. Ant 2.0 will be a major rearchitecting of Ant. It has a number of goals including:
To advance the definition of Ant, user requirements are now being accepted on the Ant-Dev mailing list. Any requirement will be accepted for consideration. The requirements are being collected into a document which is available on-line. New features will be excepted until March 21st, 2001. At that time, each requirement will be discussed for inclusion in an Ant 2.0 requirement document.
For your reference some of the goals which have shaped the development of Ant 1.x are available here. These continue to be relevant to Ant 2.0.
If you want to shape the future of Ant, join the Ant-Dev mailing list and contribute your ideas.