Preface to the Second Edition

Gosh, is it time for a new edition already? That’s one of the odd aspects of writing about open source projects: the rapid release cycles and open development process mean that things date fast—and visibly. In a closed source project, changes are invisible until the next release ships; in open source, there’s a gradual divergence between the code at the head of the repository and that covered in a book.

Java Development with Ant shipped in 2002, at the same time as Ant 1.5. Both the build tool and the book were very successful. Ant became the main way people built and tested Java projects, and our book showed how to use Ant in big projects and how to solve specific problems.

Ant 1.6 came along, and people started asking how some of the scalability improvements changed the build, and we would say “it makes it easier” without having any specifics to point to. At the same time, other interesting technologies came along to help, such as Ivy for dependency management, and other tools for deployment and testing. Java development processes had improved—and it was time to document the changes.