Apache Ant 1.6beta1 has been released. Ant 1.6 adds a lot of new features, most prominently support for XML namespaces as well as a new concept of Ant libraries that makes use of namespaces to avoid name clashes of custom tasks. This release also requires JDK 1.2 or later to run (unlike 1.5 and below which support 1.1).

Download Ant 1.6 beta.

View features and updates in the Release Notes.

In related news...

ROXES Technologies announced the availability of ROXES Ant Tasks 1.1. Version 1.1 of these tasks include many improvements and the new preferences task for accessing the Java Preferences API.

Find out more about ROXES Ant Tasks 1.1

If you could change something about Ant, what would it be?

EJB is a standard (J2EE) specification. Ant instead of creating implementation for each J2EE application server should submit a JSR request as a new request or as a part of the EJB specifications.

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Hi all,

In current project we use Ant (of course) for our daily build procedure. Although Ant is overall great, I missed support for common tasks such as:

1. Support for idlj, Sun's JDK 1.4 IDL compiler. As idlj ships with JDK, I would assume that Ant should offer support for it in it's core tasks. There is a workaround (calling compiler directly with java task), but explicit core task for idlj would be nicer, such as a task for rmic.

2. Support for validating XML with XML schema. Validating with DTD exists, but I couldn't find schema support in Ant.

Hope this task will find place in Ant 1.7, :)

Best regards,
Mileta

ANT is an open source project. Why not look at the source and contribute at least a start at such a task?

If you are doing work with idlj, creating ANT tasks will probably be trivial in comparison.

Consider idldepend task (http://grasia.fdi.ucm.es/~luismi/idldepend/). It
handles IDL dependencies and rebuilds stubs only if needed. We use it in our
production environments. It's very useful if You have a lot of IDLs and number of
heterogenous systems based on it (which is rather normal in case of CORBA). It's
adavntage is that it handles almost uniformly a number of popular IDL stub compilers (including idlj).

regards,
Artur

Hello,

XML Schema validation is possible with xmlvalidate task. Just add nested 'attribute' element with name="http://apache.org/xml/features/validation/schema" and value="true".

Cheers
Jussi

Thanks everybody for replies!

Mileta

This works in Ant 1.6+ only.