Thursday 18 February 2016

Managing project dependencies while using Ant

Ivy (The agile dependency manager) - Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking, resolving and reporting) project dependencies. It is characterized by the following:
  1. flexibility and configurability - Ivy is essentially process agnostic and is not tied to any methodology or structure. Instead it provides the necessary flexibility and configurability to be adapted to a broad range of dependency management and build processes.
  2. tight integration with Apache Ant - while available as a standalone tool, Ivy works particularly well with Apache Ant providing a number of powerful Ant tasks ranging from dependency resolution to dependency reporting and publication.
Ivy is open source and released under a very permissive Apache License.

Ivy has a lot of powerful Features, the most popular and useful being its flexibility, integration with ant, and its strong transitive dependencies management engine.

The transitive dependencies management is a feature which lets you get dependencies of your dependencies, transitively. In order to address this general problem, ivy needs to find metadata about your modules, usually in an ivy file. To find the metadata and your dependencies' artifacts (usually jars), Ivy can be configured to use a lot of different repositories.

http://ant.apache.org/ivy/index.html
http://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/latest-milestone/tutorial.html

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