Apache Ant 1.10.10 released - Better test result summary from junitlauncher task

Apache Ant 1.10.10 got released around a month back. Among the usual bug fixes, we added a new enhancement for the "junitlauncher" task.

For those of you who haven't used or know about "junitlauncher" task, it's a new task we introduced a few years back to allow projects using Ant, to be able to use the new JUnit5 testing framework. The previous (and still supported) "junit" task is meant to be used only if you want to continue using just JUnit4. If you plan to use JUnit5 (which also supports JUnit4 style testcases), then you will have to use the "junitlauncher" task.

This "junitlauncher" task has been around for a few years now and some users have reported that its "printSummary" feature isn't of much use. People familiar with the "junit" task will know that when a test gets run, the task prints an instantaneous summary like:

org.myapp.foo.bar.SimpleTest
Tests run: 5, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.002 sec

This is useful to see a quick summary of the tests being run.

The "junitlauncher" has a "printSummary" attribute which until Ant 1.10.10 version used to print a summary after all the tests had been executed. Furthermore, the printed summary was a summary that the JUnit5 framework generates by default, something like:

[junitlauncher]
[junitlauncher] Test run finished after 5103 ms
[junitlauncher] [         2 containers found      ]
[junitlauncher] [         0 containers skipped    ]
[junitlauncher] [         2 containers started    ]
[junitlauncher] [         0 containers aborted    ]
[junitlauncher] [         2 containers successful ]
[junitlauncher] [         0 containers failed     ]
[junitlauncher] [         1 tests found           ]
[junitlauncher] [         0 tests skipped         ]
[junitlauncher] [         1 tests started         ]
[junitlauncher] [         0 tests aborted         ]
[junitlauncher] [         1 tests successful      ]
[junitlauncher] [         0 tests failed          ]

As you can see, summary of this form isn't really useful. So some of the Ant users requested (https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=64836) this to be improved to provide a summary which resembled what we have with the "junit" task.

This Ant 1.10.10 release now consists that enhancement. When you use "printSummary=true" on the "junitlauncher" task, it will now print a more useful and immediate summary like the "junit" task does:

Running org.myapp.foo.bar.SimpleTest
Tests run: 5, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.002 sec


As usual, the release is available for download at the Ant downloads page https://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi. Please give this a try and if you have any suggestion or feedback on this release, please get in touch with us on our mailing lists https://ant.apache.org/mail.html or our issue tracker https://ant.apache.org/bugs.html.

 

Apache Ivy 2.5.0 released

This week, we released 2.5.0 version of Apache Ivy. Apache Ivy is a build dependency manager that is integrated with the Apache Ant build tool. The download is available as usual at https://ant.apache.org/ivy/download.cgi.

This 2.5.0 version comes after a long gap in releases of Ivy. 2.4.0 was released way back on December 26 2014. After that, the project has seen slowness in development activities. However, with help from the some community members, especially Nicolas Lalevée, back in around 2017, we had some bug fixes and enhancements done. On April 19 2018, we released 2.5.0-rc1. We called it a "rc1" because it was a long time since we had done a project release and wanted users to be aware that there might be some unexpected issues.

2.5.0-rc1 saw some community members using this version and reporting back some bugs that they ran into. We have been able to fix them during this past year and it was now finally time to release it as 2.5.0. We expect the Ivy community to start using this version in favour of older releases and report back any issues that they run into either at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IVY or in our Ivy user mailing list https://ant.apache.org/mail.html

Users migrating from previous versions of Ivy are recommended to use a fresh/clean Ivy local cache to avoid certain issues with cached Ivy metadata that might have been introduced in a previous version (2.5.0-rc1) of Ivy.

The complete list of changes (since 2.4.0) that are part of this release is available at https://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/2.5.0/release-notes.html.

Going forward, the goal is to fix any bugs that are reported and introduce certain enhancements that will help improve the usage of the tool.

Apache Ant 1.10.6 released - fork mode for junitlauncher and new jmod and link tasks

Apache Ant 1.10.6 has been released this week. This release contains numerous bug fixes as well as some very exciting new features. The complete release notes is available here and the downloads itself are available here. In this article, I will go over some of the new features that have made it into this release.

Running JUnit5 tests in a forked JVM, using junitlauncher task

A while back, Ant 1.10.x introduced support for JUnit5 tests to be launched using the new "junitlauncher" task. Given the nature of changes between JUnit 4.x and JUnit 5, the amount of support introduced in the new "junitlauncher" task was minimal. Based on user feedback about this task, this task has now been enhanced to support "fork" mode. This was one of the most asked for enhancement, in this task. The "fork" mode support in this task now allows users to configure this task to launch the tests in a forked JVM instead of running these tests within the same JVM as the one, the build is currently running in. Fork mode allows much more control over how these tests execute (things like setting up additional JVM arguments just for these tests or even system properties). The complete details of how to use fork mode in this task, is available in the manual for this task. Here's a very basic minimal example of one such usage:

<target name="test-basic-fork">
        <junitlauncher>
         <!-- Imagine test.classpath points to a previously configured path -->
            <classpath refid="test.classpath"/>
            <test name="org.example.myapp.SampleTest" outputdir="${output.dir}">
                <fork dir="${basedir}">
                    <sysproperty key="myapp-system-property" value="hello world!"/>
                </fork>
            </test>
        </junitlauncher>
</target>

The example above, sets up "junitlauncher" task to launch a test class named "org.example.myapp.SampleTest" in a forked JVM. The "fork" element in the example above is configured to setup a Java system property named "myapp-system-property" with a value of "hello world!". When the test executes, this Java system property will be made available to this test or any other class being executed in that forked JVM. More advanced ability of the "fork" element is explained in the manual linked previously.

New jmod and link tasks for Java 9+ tools

Java 9 shipped with a new modular ecosystem. This also brought in new tools to create and manage the Java modules. In this release of Ant 1.10.6, we introduce new tasks - "jmod" and "link", which can be used to create Java modules and then assemble them to create custom JVM runtime images. More details about these tasks can be found in their manuals here and here. A big thanks to Craig Pell who contributed these valuable tasks. More Java 9+ enhancements are being worked upon in Ant and we plan to make them available in future releases.

Please do download this new version of Ant and provide us feedback, suggestions in our user mailing list.

Apache Ant 1.9.13 and 1.10.5 released - Supports Java 11 single-file source programs

We just released 1.9.13 and 1.10.5 versions of Apache Ant. As usual, you can download it from the Ant project download page.

Both these versions are mainly bug fix releases. The 1.10.5 version however has a new enhancement to the "java" task. As I blogged previously - Java 11 introduces a new feature where you can execute single-file Java programs without having to explicitly compile them first. Ant 1.10.5 release now supports this feature through a new "sourcefile" attribute in the "java" task. More about it can be found the manual of that task.

A simple usage example of this new feature of the "java" task is as follows:

<project default="launch-java" name="Java 11 - launch single-file source program">

 <target name="launch-java"
            description="Simple example of single-file source program execution,
             introduced in Java 11">

        <!-- Make sure Java 11 version is being used -->
        <condition property="java11">
            <javaversion atleast="11"/>
        </condition>    
        <fail unless="java11">Java 11 runtime version is necessary to run this example</fail>        

        <mkdir dir="${basedir}/javasource"/>
        <!-- Write out simple Java code into a file -->
        <echo file="${basedir}/javasource/HelloWorld.java">
            import java.nio.file.Files;
            import java.nio.file.Paths;
            import java.io.BufferedWriter;
            public class HelloWorld {
                public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
                    System.out.println("Hello world, " + args[0] + "!");
                }
            }
        </echo>
        <!-- launch the Java source file, using the "sourcefile" attribute -->
        <java sourcefile="${basedir}/javasource/HelloWorld.java" fork="true" failonerror="true" logerror="true">
            <arg value="Java 11"/>
        </java>
    </target>
</project>

As you'll notice, the build file uses the "java" task to set the "sourcefile" attribute to point to a Java source file. The rest of the usage details of the "java" task, including passing arguments to the program, continue to remain the same as before.

When you run "ant" on this build file, you should see the following output:

[java] Hello world, Java 11!

Of course, you will need to use a Java 11 binary to run this against. You can get the early accessible Java 11 binary from here.

Apache Ivy 2.5.0-rc1 released - Now allows timeouts on resolvers

A few weeks back, we released the 2.5.0-rc1 version of Apache Ivy. Apache Ivy is a dependency management build tool, which usually is a used in combination with Apache Ant. The download is available on the project download page

This release is significant since the last release of Apache Ivy was way back in December 2014. So it's more than 3 years since the last official years. During these past few years, the project development stalled for a while. I use Apache Ivy in some of our projects and have been pretty happy with the tool. It's never a good sign to see one of your heavily used tools to be no longer under development or even have bug fixes. So a year or so back, I decided to contribute some bug fixes to the project. Over time, the project management committee invited me to be part of the team.

We decided that the first obvious, immediate goal would be to revive the project and do a formal release with bug fixes. This 2.5.0-rc1 is the result of that effort which started almost a year back. A lot of changes have gone into this release and also a good number of enhancements have made it into this release. This release has been a result of contributions from various different members from the community. The complete list of release notes is available here

We intentionally named this release 2.5.0-rc1 (release candidate) since it's been a while we have done an official release and also given the nature of changes. Please give this release a try and let us know how it goes. Depending on the feedback, we will either release 2.5.0 or 2.5.0-rc2. As usual, some of us from the development team keep an active watch in the ivy user mailing list. So if you have any feedback or questions, please do drop a mail to us, there.

Now coming to one of the enhancements in this release - there's been more than one. One of the issues I personally had was if the repository, backing a dependency resolver configured for Ivy, had some connectivity issues, the build would just hang. This was due to the inability to specify proper timeouts for communicating with these repositories through the resolver. As of this release, Ivy now allows you to configure timeouts for resolvers. This is done through the use of (the new) timeout-constraints element in your Ivy settings file. More details about it are here. Imagine you have a url resolver which points to some URL. The URL resolver would typically look something like:

<url name="foo">
  <ivy pattern=.../>
  <artifact pattern=.../>
  <artifact pattern=.../>
</url>

Let's now try and configure a connection timeout for this resolver. The first thing you would do is define a named timeout-constraint, like below:

<timeout-constraints>
        <timeout-constraint name="timeout-1" connectionTimeout="60000" />
</timeout-constraints>

The value for the name attribute can be anything of your choice. The value for connectionTimeout attribute is represented as a timeout in milli seconds. In the above example, we configure the "timeout-1" timeout-constraint to be of 1 minute. You can even specify a readTimeout which too is in milli seconds. More about this element can be found in the documentation.

As you might notice, we have just defined a timeout-constraint here but haven't yet instructed Ivy to use this constraint for some resolver. We do that in the next step, where we set the "timeoutConstraint" attribute on the URL resolver that we had seen before:

<url name="foo" timeoutConstraint="timeout-1">
  <ivy pattern=.../>
  <artifact pattern=.../>
  <artifact pattern=.../>
</url>

Notice that the value of "timeoutConstraint" attribute now points to "timeout-1" which we defined to have a 1 minute connection timeout. With this, when this URL resolver gets chosen by Ivy for dependency resolution, this connection timeout will be enforced and if the connections fails to be established within this timeout, then an exception gets thrown instead of the build hanging forever.

Although the example uses a URL resolver to setup the timeout constraint, this feature is available for all resolvers that are shipped out of the box by Ivy. So you can even use it with the ibiblio resolver (which communicates with Maven central) too.


Like I noted earlier, please do give this release a try and let us know how it goes.

Apache Ant new versions (1.9.10 and 1.10.2) released

This past year has been pretty hectic, so I haven't had a chance to update this blog more often.

In my limited spare time last year, I started contributing to Apache Ant project. Although Ant probably isn't as widely used as some years back, it still is used in many projects, as the build tool. Some of the products I'm involved in, does use Ant and that motivated me to contribute to some bug fixes in Ant. After a period of time, last year, I was invited to be a committer and a few weeks back, to be part of the Ant project management committee (PMC), which I consider a honour.

Just today, we released a couple of new versions of Ant - 1.9.10 and 1.10.2. These are essentially bug fix releases but do contain some new enhancements. The complete release notes, for each of these releases, can be found  here and here.

The downloads are available from the project's download page and the full announcement, in the mailing list, can be read here

If you have any issues/suggestions/feedback about the project, feel free to report it in the user mailing list which is listed on this page.