(Apologies in advance for the length of this post)
The feeling has been growing in me that a future version of Ant should abstract the concept of file I/O with an interface that can supply InputStreams and OutputStreams, or Readers and Writers if we can restrict to character content--which would be quite possible--or both. With this type of abstraction a property could be treated as a file (existing properties could be read-only and throw appropriate Exceptions when overwrite attempts were made. This could add, I feel, a good deal of flexibility for a fairly low cost.
I guess the motivating factor to this idea is my intense dislike of the clutter of temp files, especially when they do very little.
Comments?
There has been discussion on a better abstract file/directory abstraction, as there are so many more things than a file system that can be a source or a dest.
Properties are an interesting one, the inside of JAR and ZIP files another, remote ftp, http and SCP connections a third.
There is the VFS project in the jakarta commons sandbox
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/vfs/index.html
that implements this. The ant tasks there look kind of slick. I should play with them myself.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
