A good thought , its really a good feature -----Original Message----- From: Huxi LI [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 1:54 PM To: user@ant.apache.org Subject: Asking for new feature: Self-Discovery of service to make Ant a real extensible system
**Hi everyone, I would like to launch a discussion about implementation of self-discovery feature in Ant. The idea is that when users drop a jar in share directory, all custiom tasks and datatypes should be discovered automatically by Ant. The same is true when jars are removed from the share directory. The advantage is that users do not need any more use Taskdef to declare custom tasks. This makes Ant a highly extensible "plug-and-play" system. Modern systems are becoming more and more intelligent. I think Ant maybe do better. The concept of "plug-and-play" is not any more a vocaburary reserved for hardware components; software is also advancing in this direction. An extensible system should be able to "dynamically" discover available services and have conflict detection and resolution capability. A simple example of self-discovery is the "hot deployment" service available in most J2EE application servers. The complexity of implementation such a mechanism depends on many factors. Sometimes it is not the complexity to implement self-discovery service; it is often simple ignored by developers. For the Ant build system, it is fairly easy to implement self-discovery feature. Huxi LI --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
