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# Welcome

### Ant1.8.1

### May 6th, 2010 - Ant 1.8.1 Released

Apache Ant 1.8.1 is now available for download as source or binary (with and without dependencies) from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi.

Key features of the 1.8.1 release are

- new task augment allows to add attributes or nested elements to previously defined references
- numerous bug fixes and improvements as documented in Bugzilla and in WHATSNEW

### Ant 1.8.0

### February 8, 2010 - Ant 1.8.0 Available

Key features of the 1.8.0 release are

- Lexically scoped local properties, i.e. properties that are only defined inside a target, sequential block or similar environment.
- <import> can now import from any file- or URL-providing resource - this includes <javaresource>.
- Various improvements to the directory scanning code that help with symbolic link cycles (as can be found on MacOS X Java installations for example) and improve scanning performance. For big directory trees the improvement is dramatic.
- The way developers can extend Ant's property expansion algorithm has been rewritten (breaking the older API) to be easier to use and be more powerful.
- a new top level element extension-point allows build files to be extended with custom targets more easily
- At the same time the if and unless attributes have been rewritten to do the expected thing if applied to a property expansion (i.e. if="${foo}" will mean "yes, do it" if ${foo} expands to true, in Ant 1.7.1 it would mean "no" unless a property named "true" existed). This adds "testing conditions" as a new use-case to property expansion.
- Ant now requires Java 1.4 or later
- new task include provides an alternative to <import> that should be preferred when you don't want to override any targets
- numerous bug fixes and improvements as documented in Bugzilla and in WHATSNEW

### Ivy 2.1.0

### October 8, 2009 - Apache Ivy 2.1.0 Released

Apache Ivy 2.1.0 is now available for download as source or binary (with and without dependencies) from http://ant.apache.org/ivy/download.cgi.

Key features of the 2.1.0 release are

- enhanced Maven2 compatibility, with several bug fixes and more pom features covered
- new options for the Ivy Ant tasks and commandline
- configuration intersections and configuration groups
- numerous bug fixes and improvements as documented in Jira and in the release notes

For more information see the Ivy home page.

### AntUnit 1.1

### September 26, 2008 - Apache AntUnit 1.1 Released

Apache AntUnit 1.1 Beta is now available for download as binary or source release.

In addition to a few bugfixes and some new assertions AntUnit 1.1 allows test listeners to receive the log output of the project under test. Both plainlistener and xmllistener have an option that makes them echo the project's output into their respective logs.

For more information see the Antlib's home page

### Apache Ant

Ant is a Java library and command-line tool. Ant's mission is to drive processes described in build files as targets and extension points dependent upon each other. The main known usage of Ant is the build of Java applications. Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing to compile, assemble, test and run Java applications. Ant can also be used effectively to build non Java applications, for instance C or C++ applications. More generally, Ant can be used to pilot any type of process which can be described in terms of targets and tasks.

Ant is written in Java. Users of Ant can develop their own "antlibs" containing Ant tasks and types, and are offered a large number of ready-made commercial or open-source "antlibs".

Ant is extremely flexible and does not impose coding conventions or directory layouts to the Java projects which adopt it as a build tool.

Software development projects looking for a solution combining build tool and dependency management can use Ant in combination with Ivy.

### Documentation

You can view the documentation for the current release (Apache Ant 1.8.0) online

Comprehensive documentation is included in the source and binary distributions.

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