The list of proposals for new tasks for Ant2 contains the following: * Task to extract classes from a JAR file that a given class depends on.
Based on <depend> or IBM's JAX for example. [ACCEPTED] My comments: 1. Class dependency information can be useful in many ways. My suggestion is, that the processing of this information should be kept as generic as possible. 2. The dependency cache generated by the <depend> task contains the base information. It would be nice if I could generate this information without any further action like deleting class files depending on outdated files. 3. It would also be nice if the proposed extraction would not only work on JAR files, but also on the class files in the grove of class file directories. 4. It would be even nicer if the proposed task could find all dependencies of a subset of the class file grove. 5. I would start jubilating, if I could map the set of dependent class files to a set of source files, from which these class files have been compiled. There are possibly more class files than source files, so this mapping should be tolerant. 6. Then I could do really neat things like running javadoc on the sources and ship the documentation with the jar, I created from the class files. 7. Altogether I can have the class files of different components spread over a set of different project directories. I just have to name the main class(es) of a component (the class containing the main method for my application / the EJB classes / the servlet classes of my webapp) and ANT can collect all dependent classes, make the jar or war and generate the javadocs for the component. I believe that this is especially useful if you have different teams working together to develop distributed application components which share utility classes and call each others services using remote interfaces. Best regards, Christof Helfrich -- GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet. http://www.gmx.net
