I thought I would let people here know that there is some discussion on
the Developers list about possible future directions of Ant. Perhaps
some people here would like to join the Dev list, at least temporarily,
so that they could contribute their thoughts.
Briefly, some of the ideas that have been batted around include:
1. Keeping build file compatibility but dropping backwards
compatibility of embedded programming of Ant in other programs (this
compatibility goes back over 10 years and makes significant changes to
the core behaviour of Ant more difficult). This new version of Ant would
probably become Ant 2.
2. Basing Ant 2 on Java 7 since there are huge performance increases
on File I/O and a complete revamping of how file systems are addressed.
Ant 1 would continue to be developed and maintained in parallel for
quite a while, so no one would be abandoned due to JVM requirements.
3. Reworking the core of Ant to reflect the lessons learned from the
past decade of build systems. This would allow new concepts to be
adopted in the core engine, to simplify the design, and to make it Ant
more flexible so that new features and build styles could be better
accommodated.
4. Keeping most existing tasks as they are since they are so well
debugged and tested, with perhaps some minor changes to bring them up to
modern standards of coding like making them POJOs with annotations.
5. Adding features like:
a) Identifying ways for Ant to automatically find parts of a build
that can be run in parallel. This allows taking advantage of multicores
for example.
b) Distributed Ant builds in a cluster or a cloud.
c) a new build style that is about moving resources from state to
state rather than just defining targets and tasks.
If you find any of these interesting, or if you have your own ideas to
add, come join us. Subscribe to the ant-dev mailing list with an email
to *dev-subscr...@ant.apache.org*. You can always unsubscribe whenever
you want from the same email address you subscribed with by sending an
email to dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org.
If you'd like to review what has been discussed already before deciding
to subscribe, you can see some of the threads in the archives:
http://marc.info/?l=ant-dev&m=132915757213013&w=2
<http://marc.info/?l=ant-dev&m=132915757213013&w=2>
http://marc.info/?t=132915760000006&r=1&w=2
<http://marc.info/?t=132915760000006&r=1&w=2>
http://marc.info/?t=132959105500001&r=1&w=2
<http://marc.info/?t=132959105500001&r=1&w=2>
http://marc.info/?l=ant-dev&m=132944232712547&w=2
<http://marc.info/?l=ant-dev&m=132944232712547&w=2>
