A new top-level element assists in writing re-usable build files that are meant to be imported.

This adds 'testing conditions' as a new use-case to property expansion. if='$ expands to true, in Ant 1.7.1 it would mean 'no' unless a property named 'true' existed). 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. Things like the yet-to-be-released props Antlib can now provide often required 'scripty' fuctions without touching Ant itself. The whole local properties mechanism is implemented using that API and could be implemented in a separate library without changes in Ant's core.

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.

For big directory trees the improvement is dramatic.

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.

There are several other improvements in the area of import. This means can read build file snippets from JARs or fixed server URLs.

can now import from any file- or URL-providing resource - this includes.This is very useful inside of s where a macro can now define a temporary property that will disappear once the task has finished.

properties that are only defined inside a target, sequential block or similar environment.

Lexically scoped local properties, i.e.

Apache ant 1.7 release dates