Appendix A. The Future of Ant
Most open source projects evolve at an almost alarming rate, and Ant is no exception. Over the course of just over two years, Ant moved from a prototype build tool for building Tomcat to becoming the preferred build tool for many Java projects. On the bright side, rapid changes mean more features and more solutions for the many problems developers face in building and distributing their projects. On the dark side, rapid changes mean instability — developers have to stay on their toes to make sure releases with new features don’t break the current features they’re using.
The maintainers of the Ant project are aware of how their contributions can affect thousands of people’s projects and work. In early 2001, they set forth on a plan to refactor Ant’s design. Over time, Ant’s library has become bloated. Features of some tasks overlap features of others. There is no contract between the developers of the Ant engine and developers of Ant tasks and listeners. Some implementations in the Ant engine are poorly written and need refactoring; this refactoring could affect the design in many objects. The effort for all of these changes could take months, even years. It is unacceptable to leave a working project in a state of constant development for this long. Because of this, the maintainers elected to go forward with a fork, to create Ant2.
Ant2
The maintainers of Ant are taking proposals from the user and developer base for redesign and refactoring. A new set ...
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