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authorgregor <gregor@d688527b-c9ab-4aba-bd8d-4036d912da1d>2003-07-07 15:46:46 +0000
committergregor <gregor@d688527b-c9ab-4aba-bd8d-4036d912da1d>2003-07-07 15:46:46 +0000
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+<html>
+<head>
+<title>Welcome to Ant1.5</title>
+</head>
+<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
+<h1>Welcome to Ant1.5</h1>
+Hello, and welcome to Ant1.5
+<p>
+For new users to Ant, welcome to a new way to build your software.
+<p>
+For veteran Ant users, its been, what nine months since Ant 1.4.1
+shipped, and we've been as busy enhancing it as you've been using it.
+<p>
+
+We know you've been using Ant, not just from the all the bug reports we
+see, but from the awards we've been getting from JavaWorld and SD Magazine
+and from the fact that it is now clearly a mainstream product. Every quality IDE,
+from the Open Source projects: Emacs, NetBeans, Eclipse, JEdit, to the
+commercial offerings such as IntelliJ IDEA and JBuilder now have high
+quality Ant integration either built in or available as a
+download. And they do that not just because it improves their products,
+giving users the best of both worlds -great editors and a great build
+process, but because Java developers are starting to expect Ant (and
+JUnit) everywhere.
+<p>
+Even in mid-2001, if you said you were using Ant in your project, people
+would stare at you. Now, as long as you are talking with Java developers
+and not management or your family and friends, people will nod, shrug
+and maybe ask you questions about build file and Ant configurations. The good
+news: Ant 1.5 includes more helpful error messages and a new
+<tt>-diagnostics</tt> command to look at your Ant installation and help work out why
+things arent working.
+<p>
+Now, when you tell people you work on Ant in your spare time,
+people used to give you very funny stares; now they ask you about how to
+set up automated build processes, or deploy to some random app server.
+The good news: Ant 1.5 makes it easier to answer those questions.
+
+The other sign of mainstream is that there are also books on the
+subject, first Java Tools for Extreme Programming, then Ant: The
+Definitive Guide, and the first Ant1.5 book, Java Development with Ant,
+due to ship at the end of the month. (Steve says: I prefer the one with
+my name on the cover as co-author, but I'm biased).
+As usual, the manual has improved too:
+regardless of whether you need a book to work with Ant or not, you need
+that on-line documentation. And as usual, any extra contributions to the
+docs are welcome indeed.
+<p>
+Ant has also influenced how projects are built. Now when you download
+any open source project, or work with a closed source team, you expect
+to see a file called build.xml there. Equally important, you expect that
+build file to compile and run a set of tests using JUnit or a derivative
+thereof; if they are missing, you worry.
+<p>
+Together, Ant and JUnit have transformed the mainstream process for
+building and deploying Java projects. And that's pretty profound, when
+you think about it. What is equally impressive is that this was all done
+as a co-operative effort. Nobody works on Ant full-time; everybody uses
+it to solve their problems, to address their build crises and generally
+get something done in a hurry. It just so happens that the architectural
+model of Java classes bound via introspection to the XML build file
+makes it easy for people to add new tasks, extend existing ones and
+generally ease their way into developing and extending Ant. It is the
+users that have helped Ant become the success it is today, and will keep
+it that way tomorrow.
+<p>
+<h2>What has changed</h2>
+<p>
+So, what is new in Ant1.5? Lots of stuff. You will have to look at the
+<a href="WHATSNEW">whatsnew</a> file to see, but basically the changes
+fall into a number of categories
+<ol>
+<li>Bug fixes. We know, some things were broken in 1.4. In ant1.5 we
+have moved the bugs, fixing the ones we could, and no doubt adding
+different ones. Hopefully the total bug count has decreased.
+<li>Scalability. Changes in &lt;ant&gt; and a few other tasks should
+make it easier to write large, scalable build files.
+<li>Deployment. Take a look at the new &lt;serverdeploy&gt; task, add support
+for your server if it isnt there. Tomcat 4.1 has its own deployment
+tasks incidentally -fetch them from the tomcat pages.
+<li>Ease of use. We have added new attributes to make the archive tasks
+consistent with each other, new error messages for common problems (you
+get a screenful of help when a task wont instantiate, for example), and
+generally try and be helpful. As usual, we will accept contributions to
+the documentation or the code for even more helpfulness. Hey, in ant1.5
+you dont need to double escape the $ sign to preserve it in a string!
+<li>Java 1.4 support. We build and test fine on Java 1.4, and have the
+extensions to javac needed to build code with assertions in. We should
+point out that we have more work to do in this area: if someone wants to
+write an &lt;assertionset&gt; datatype to give users control of which assertions
+to enable, and patch this in to things like the &lt;junit&gt; and
+&lt;java&gt; tasks, things would get very interesting.
+<li>Continuous builds. Automated build tools are becoming more widely
+used; fork options on &lt;javac&gt; and &lt;javadoc&gt; are there to
+stop memory use growth on a continuous process.
+<li>New platforms: MacOS X for owners of those cute little laptops,
+Novell Netware servers, and even z/OS and OS/390 for mainframe
+developers who write their build files on their virtual card punches.
+<li>Conditions. Take a look at the &lt;condition&gt; tag to see what you can
+look for, then at &lt;waitfor&gt; to use the same tests in deployment.
+Finally, notice the <tt>if</tt> and <tt>unless</tt> attributes on
+&lt;fail&gt; for easy halting of the build on a condition, without
+having to resort to conditional targets.
+</ol>
+
+There are many more enhancements, so we hope you will find your build
+projects easier. We have, as usual, jumped through hoops to keep
+existing builds working, even those build files that went out their way
+to not work on Java 1.4 (hint: dont ask for the classic compiler, it has
+gone away). If your build file stops working, and it isnt something listed
+on the 'changes that may break your build' part of the WHATSNEW file, or
+something we know about on bugzilla, please dont hesitate to file a new
+bug report, preferably one with a replicable test and a patch to fix the
+problem.
+<p>
+Thanks,
+<p>
+The Ant development team.
+<p>
+PS: many thanks for Magesh to being the build manager for this release!
+He has been busy since Feb/March organizing it. Magesh -you are so good
+at this you should do it next time too :)
+</body></html>
+