Bruce, In fact I was thinking about the same thing. The idea of forking Ant and rewrite parts of it to use Java 7 NIO, and introduce java plugin frame work http://jpf.sourceforge.net/ crossed my mind few times.
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 1:25 PM, Bruce Atherton <br...@callenish.com> wrote: > I actually wanted to discuss Java 7 on the list. I went through its > features a while ago and got really excited when I read through NIO 2.0. It > does so much that Ant has to struggle with, and so much that Ant can't do. > > I spent some time starting to implement a very simple (only a few tasks) > new version of Ant that started from Java 7. Personal issues have taken me > out of the game for a while, but I've still been wondering, could Java 7 > and NIO 2.0 be a good reason to create Ant 2.0? > > I realize I am violating "Shut up and show me the code". While I > personally won't be able to help much for the foreseeable future, I've seen > communities be revitalized by creating a new codebase. It attracts new > committers who have been annoyed by the previous bug/feature combinations > and get excited about the possibilities of helping to create a new > codebase. Cocoon did it twice, although I wouldn't recommend that because > the people attracted by Cocoon 2.2 went away because they felt their > efforts were wasted thanks to Cocoon 3.0. > > It could be a way to sweep away the kind of cruft that is holding up the > release and to redesign Ant to reflect all the lessons learned about how to > build software in the last 10 years. Or it could be I'm the only one who > read through the NIO 2.0 features and instantly thought about rewriting Ant. > > What do you guys think about it? > > On 2/5/2012 11:25 PM, Stefan Bodewig wrote: > >> On 2012-02-05, Mansour Al Akeel wrote: >> >> I have been looking and developing some custom task for ant, for the last >>> few days. I noticed that ant tasks don't use java.io directly. I am >>> assuming this is due to the way java.io.File behave on different >>> platforms, >>> and the support for patterns .... etc. >>> >> You must not forget that parts of Ant have been written at a time where >> Java2 was too new to require it as runtime environment. >> >> However, now with java 7, we have the Path class that is very convenient >>> to >>> use. I think having this will make writing tasks easier, by cuting down >>> the >>> steps to convert between ants Path and java.nio.file.Path. >>> Are there any interests ? >>> >> Yes, there is. >> >> Just now we have voted to accept Java5 (yes, 5, not 7) as our minimum >> requirement for Ant's trunk following the upcoming 1.8.3 release. This >> means we can not use Java7 features directly. >> >> One approach that may be possible is to write a FileUtils replacement >> using Java7 features. Almost all file system interactions of Ant go >> through FileUtils and Ant's core could detect at runtime whether Java7 >> is around and use the matching FileUtils class. >> >> Stefan >> >> ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org >> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org >> >> > ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org > >
