July Jakarta Newsletter - Ant

[Erik Hatcher <ja...@ehatchersolutions.com>]

Rob and ant-dev,

Here is my first draft of a July newsletter piece on Ant.  I appreciate 
the hard work you've done on the newsletter more after working on this 
and spending half the afternoon perusing the archives for goodies to 
include.  I'm sending this off to ant-dev for an editing sweep to 
correct any misrepresentations I might have added, etc.

----
Editor: Erik Hatcher

Ant has been modified to support all tasks outside of <target> (in the 
current CVS version only, at the moment) [1].

Costin Monolache is spearheading an implementation of an <import> 
facility with much discussion of the gory details of how this will work 
especially with the -projecthelp switch. This work is in the 
proposal/embed tree of Ant's CVS [2].

A large discussion on target-less build files has occurred [3, 4, 5, 6]

Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran, with Manning's permission, contributed 
a concise and accurate Ant 1.5 PDF task reference from their 
hot-off-the-press Java Development with Ant book. This lives in Ant's 
CVS and will likely be included in any bug fix releases of Ant 1.5 [14, 15].

Costin started a large thread with "itches for Ant 1.6" [9]. Steve 
Loughran followed with his wishlist for the next version of Ant [7].

Splitting optional.jar into separate JAR libraries was a hot topic in 
July [8].

Conor MacNeill withdraws his Mutant Ant2 proposal [10].

By far the most active thread was on the never-ending topic of Ant2, 
with notable discussions of importing reusable project pieces and 
project extensibility and overridability [11].

dIon Gillard stirred things up with an "inflamatory e-mail" early in the 
month, sparking lots of Ant2 discussion [12].

Last, but not least - Ant 1.5 was released and has proven itself solid [13].

* 
[1] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=101543270100009&r=1&w=2&n=17
* 
[2] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102767954900003&r=1&w=2&n=14
* 
[3] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102750506600002&r=1&w=2&n=27
* 
[4] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102704723700002&r=1&w=2&n=32
* 
[5] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102740536200001&r=1&w=2&n=16
* 
[6] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102697608600008&r=1&w=2&n=38
* 
[7] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102736845700003&r=1&w=2&n=37
* 
[8] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102689872400003&r=1&w=2&n=44
* 
[9] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102649786700004&r=1&w=2&n=42
* 
[10] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102635682000001&r=1&w=2&n=36
* 
[11] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102608695800001&r=1&w=2&n=91
* 
[12] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102604006200002&r=1&w=2&n=40
* 
[13] - http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-ant/release/v1.5/
* 
[14] - 
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/jakarta-ant/docs/appendix_e.pdf?rev=1.1&content-type=application/pdf
* 
[15] - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1930110588
-----

I used the same format that I found in jakarta-site for this, so it 
should easily plug into your larger XML file.  I put the items in the 
list in reverse chronological order, but perhaps they should be 
reversed?  And yes, there was a slight bit of self-promotion in there, 
and if that is not cool, feel free to tone it down or remove it (could 
be worse, I could advertise it in my .sig, but I find that a bit too 
much 8-).

	Erik

Rob Oxspring wrote:
> Hiya,
> 
> Just wondered if you would be interested in editing the July newsletter
> entry from ant as I'm a bit stuck for time this week (family wedding
> etc).  Just thought I'd give you first refusal as you've expressed an
> interest in the past.  Otherwise I'll just post a note to ant-dev and
> hope that someone will pick the task up.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Rob
> 
> 
> 



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