All:
I have a potential contribution to make, but am a trifle intimidated by the instruction not to use e-mail attachments on the main site instructions. This is cool (I certainly understand it), but there's too much to make a e-mail of, and I'm temporarily between URLs ;>)
What's happened is this: I have had a problem with Struts for some time. Those of you on this list who use Struts may recognize it: ApplicationResources.properties. The Struts framework is great, but it reads (out-of-box) only a single properties file for internationalization, et al. On my current project (I'm the tech lead, so have some influence for a change), we are making good use of Struts, but this one file is a hassle. We're religious about using good internationalization practices, so the GUI is filled with properties, and everyone checks it out and forgets to check it back in.
The obvious solution is to have multiple properties files. One way to handle that is rewrite Struts to load as many files as needed, which would work. Another (perhaps slightly cleverer) way is to have Ant build the single file we need out of the multiple files we work from. After all, the single file is not a problem for the machine, just for us.
This is the task I have written, called Concatenate. It is a significant rewrite of the Copy task (which I started by subclassing), but not so complete as a new design. Also required was adding new methods to FileUtils, SourceFileScanner, and an additional StringUtils class (there may be a better way to handle the problem the latter is for, and if so I welcome comments). I was reasonably careful to avoid using anything I was aware was 1.1-incompatible, but have not tested it yet in such an environment.
What would be the best way to send all this along, or is this not something anyone else would be interested in?
Thanks.
David Sills
