There are plenty of things you can do to help out with Myrmidon. The Todo list below describes items which still need to be done. Of course, since this is an open-source project, there's plenty of scope for experimentation, and you can pretty much make up your own items to work on.

Some things that are worth reading if you do want to get involved:

• The Ant 2 goals and requirements.
• The Ant 1.9 Action List.
• The Jakarta Project's Get Involved page.

There is no Ant 2 or Myrmidon mailing list yet, so direct any questions or comments you have to the ant-dev mailing list.

The broad goal is to grow Myrmidon from a prototype task engine into a fully fledged build system, that can serve as the basis for Ant 2. The following sections describe some of the many things which still need to be done to achieve that goal. This list is currently under construction.

Self Hosting

Myrmidon must be able to build itself. Currently, it is built using Ant 1.x. Ultimately, Myrmidon should be able to build itself from exactly the same build file. To start with, however, there is no need for Myrmidon to be able to do this. Myrmidon should also be able to be bootstrapped (that is, be able to be built from scratch, without using Ant 1.x at all).

Ant 1.x Compatibility

There are 2 parts to this broad topic: Allow Ant 1.x build scripts to be executed by Myrmidon, and allow Ant 1.x tasks to be executed unmodified by Myrmidon.

Virtual File System

The VFS needs plenty of work: Move and copy files/folders. Search through a file hierarchy, using Ant-style wildcards. Search through a file hierarchy, using a Selector interface. The in-memory caching mechanism is pretty rudimentary at this stage. It needs work to make it size capped. In addition, some mechanism needs to be provided to release and refresh cached info. Capabilities discovery. Attributes and attribute schema. File system layering. That is, the ability for a file system to sit on top of another file system, or a file from another file system (e.g. Zip/Jar/Tar file systems, gzip/encoding file systems, virtual file systems).

Command-line and Configuration Files

One of the goals of Ant 2 is to allow the user to easily customise and extend Ant. The command-line and local configuration files, are two places where this would be done. Currently, Myrmidon some customisation from the command-line, but does not support configuration files. Load configuration from system (from $ANT_HOME) and user (from $HOME) configuration files. Allow the following via config files: Add (or override) the lib and ext directories. Enable more than one listener, and configure the listeners from the conents of the config file. Import libraries, and set properties. Execute tasks. Install and configure runtime services.

Documentation

Everyone loves writing documentation, and so a goal for Ant 2 is to generate a lot of reference documentation for tasks and other types directly from the source. Unfortunately, there's still plenty of tutorial material to write. In particular we need these: User documentation - describing things like the build file format, how properties work, how to use references, how sub-builds work, how to customise Myrmidon, and so on. Task writer documentation - describing things like an overview the task API, how configuration works, task lifecycle, how to assemble an antlib, a catalog of the runtime services, and so on. Myrmidon developer documentation - a broad outline of the architecture, how to build, how to test, and so on. Also, this todo list needs plenty of filling out.

Miscellaneous

A completely unordered list of items, big and small: Search through the code for 'TODO' items and fix them. Add a custom task to the build to generate antlib descriptors from source. It would wrap XDoclet, and replace antlib.xml. Tidy-up CLIMain so that it calls System.exit() with a non-zero exit code, if the build fails. Tidy-up the 'build failed' message, so that the stack trace is only printed out if the log level is verbose/debug. Allow service factories to be configured from the contents of the ant-services.xml descriptor. Route external process stdout and stderr through the logger. Add verbosity level to ProjectListener LogEvent Fire ProjectListener events taskFinished(), targetFinished() and projectFinished() events on build failure, adding indicator methods to ProjectEvent. Fire ProjectListener events projectStarted() and projectFinished() events on start and finish of referenced projects, adding indicator methods to ProjectEvent. Convert PropertyUtil to a non-static PropertyResolver service. Validate project and target names in DefaultProjectBuilder - reject dodgy names like "," or "", or " ". Probably want to exclude names that start or end with white-space (though internal whitespace is probably fine). Detect duplicate type names. Add fully qualified type names, based on antlib name and type shorthand name. Allow these to be used in build files in addition to the shorthand names. Unit tests.